The AEC industry is relying on technology to run their daily processes which include the line of business applications, productivity tools like the word, excel. But if an unknown downtime occurs, it impacts the business resulting in a revenue loss.

What could go wrong? There are no definite answers, but disasters vary in types that includes man-made, natural and then the cyber-attacks. The severity of the downtime is also important to understand how quickly you can get back on track. With a well thought backup and disaster recovery plan, you should be able to estimate how soon you could get back.

What should the Disaster Recovery plan include?

Disaster plans can cover everything from how to get out of your store or office during a fire drill, save lives and emergency management.

As the subject is on IT, the plan should include how to get back up and running if your servers are underwater, or under cyber-attack.

Disaster recovery plan is not the same for businesses because of the objectives and the selection of the solution. However, the plan should address;

• Technology asset inventory that names mission-critical processes and data

• Schedule for updating and testing any disaster recovery plans

• A clear understanding of the trade-offs between cost and complexity

Understand how your plan works

Whoever drafts the plan, the best way to understand is first to ensure you get answers for these questions.

• Does your plan include an inventory of mission-critical business processes and data?

• When was the last time anyone reviewed your plan? Tested your plan?

• Is cyberattack preparedness included in your current plan?

• How much depends upon human intervention?

Automate the DR process

Referring to the last question above, it is given that human resources may have priorities in an emergency like a disaster and hence automating the DR process is a good consideration.

A cloud-based solution is a best option to recover quickly. Whether it’s a large or small business, this works from a financial perspective as the cost should be less than that of a traditional setup.

Evaluate

You’d need to make some research and comparisons to understand which solution provider fits your business model.

• Do they offer a hybrid solution so that you can keep some data on-premise as well as in the cloud?

• Do they offer metered service so that you can save even more money by ‘turning off’ services when you don’t need them?

• Is the service easy to use, with good support for your team?

• Do they offer geo-redundancy?

• Are they compliant with your industry?

Is the cloud a safe option?

Yes, it is.  But there may be also scenarios where an enterprise or small companies losing their data in the cloud during disasters. It could be due to a poor backup strategy.  Copies of data should be available in multiple regions for a successful restore or recovery when one region is hit.

With the Microsoft cloud, you can get ‘geo-redundancy.’ This means that your data is in more than one location. So, if your area is hit with a hurricane, along with floods and electrical storms, your data would be safe in a data center across the country.

That also means that your company data is available even during the storm.

What’s the next step?

A disaster recovery plan needs to go through a test at least once a year. Review your document, and if you find that it needs improvement or requires a fresh approach, contact us, we could assist you.

In addition, we have an e-guide to help you with the DR process.

Download E-Guide