An incomplete or poorly prepared backup and disaster recovery (BDR) plan can result in unacceptably long outages and lost revenue for your company.
Unfortunately, busy IT employees don’t always have the time to update BDR plans or test them thoroughly. Partnering with your managed IT services provider (MSP) to improve, refine and test your plan offers a simple way to ensure the effectiveness of this valuable resource.
Here are some of the ways your MSP can help you make sure your backup and disaster recovery plan is everything it should be.
Identifying stakeholders
The infrastructure staff and senior managers aren’t the only stakeholders crucial to the success of your BDR plan.
Your MSP can help you identify others in the company who should be involved, such as database managers and application testers. These employees can offer valuable insights and help you identify resources you’ll need to restore your systems.
Setting milestones
It’s not unusual to overlook a crucial milestone or two when developing your BDR plan timeline. Like most IT projects, BDR plans involve multiple stakeholders each tasked with carrying out a small piece of the plan.
MSP staff will help you evaluate the entire plan to ensure that important milestones are noted, including those related to network connectivity, resources, infrastructure, storage, proof of concept, storage replication, recovery point objectives, testing and backup data.
Anticipating disaster scenarios and determining responsibilities
Fires, floods and cyber threats may be the first things that come to mind when you think about disasters, but as British Airways found out in May 2017, even seemingly small problems can lead to major issues. A power surge and outage led to the cancellation of 75,000 flights and forced the airline to pay $68 million in passenger compensation.
Although a power outage should have been a minor blip, the surge also destroyed the airline’s backup system, complicating restoration. The story illustrates the importance of developing a secondary backup plan in your BDR plan.
In addition to assisting you in creating a backup plan, your managed IT services provider will also help you ensure that your employees understand their roles should a disaster occur.
The MSP team can assist you in breaking down specific tasks in the BDR plan, determining which staff members will be responsible for each detail, and creating a communication plan in the event that your team can’t communicate through its usual channels.
Providing documentation
Lack of documentation can doom your BDR plan, yet it’s a common factor in incomplete plans. When Disaster Recovery Journal surveyed 1,000 firms, the publication discovered that 31.5 percent had incomplete BDR plans.
If your key stakeholders haven’t had the time to document crucial processes and instructions, that knowledge will be lost if they ever leave the company. MSP staff will work with your internal staff to develop the documentation needed to fully restore your systems after a disaster or outage.
Additional IT support
In the process of creating a backup and disaster recovery plan, it sometimes happens that you’ll discover other areas where your IT support may be lacking. If you wish, your MSP can jump in and provide either one-time consultation or ongoing IT support to ensure you’re completely taken care of.
Your backup and disaster recovery
Sooner or later, every company experiences some sort of disaster.
Whether a cyberterrorist hacks your website, an employee makes a big mistake, or a hurricane destroys your data center, a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery plan is the key to resolving disruptions quickly.
Partnering with your MSP will help you ensure that your plan will actually work when it’s needed.