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Posts Tagged ‘Disaster’

To elucidate the importance of internet disaster recovery services let us put forward an occurrence. Back in the year 2007, a Customs office based in Los Angeles International Airport, witnessed a sudden computer crash. This in turn led to the delay of over 17,000 airline travelers. In addition to that, US Customs officials discovered that it was the malfunctioning network card that resulted Custom’s to misplace all relevant details required for accessing databases and national systems, including the local area network. Thus, this failure had a “domino” effect resulting passenger delays and losing vital information. Technical Professionals later took about ten hours to assess and resort to a recovery process to resolve the problem.

Therefore, we can conclude that there was an acute need of robust disaster recovery services that would address the infrastructure and network simultaneously. Applications, for instance ERM, CRM and e-mails depend on the network for proper implementation.

Leading providers of disaster recovery solutions enables users to retrieve all lost data without any hassle and secures the business from any unforeseen data loss or theft. They also provide security against systematic and natural disasters. Other benefits are listed below-

* Manage brand reputation and image

* Reduces operational losses and disturbance

* Manage the recovery deployments in a structured manner

* Guards and ensures survival against potential threats

* Restores the confidence of customers, stakeholders and investors

These organizations are also market players in data backup and recovery service, that helps in electronically backing up your data along with numerous security features. An in-built technology further helps in compressing your the data up to 40 to 60 percent, and then overcoats it with other security measures, encrypts it and finally securely saves it in an electronic data vault. This data compression signifies the requirement of a low backup storage and bandwidth for relocation.

However, keeping in mind the possibility of data losses and thefts it is imperative that you realize how a minor security breach can prove detrimental to the business. Service providers of data recovery solutions thus provide firewall services as well. The various benefits that can ensue to any organization from this are listed below-

* 24 x firewall operation monitoring

* Shared firewall services

* Firewall configuration for data backup

* High Availability firewall services

* Load Balancing service

* Dedicated firewall services

* System administration for firewall, comprising all the updates that influence the firewall performance

Therefore, the security of your company’s crucial data lies entirely on your hand. You simply need to choose a disaster recovery plan in advance, in order to avoid even the minor information loss and disruptions.

When running a busy medical practice, you’ll be responsible for crucial and highly sensitive information about your patients.  For any business, it’s important to protect any files or other information that is critical to the success of your business.  When it comes to the healthcare field, it’s even more imperative that this information is protected in any situation.  A disaster recovery plan is an important part of preparing for any situation and finding a way to protect the information crucial to your business.  With the responsibility for important medical information, it’s even more important to understand disaster recovery and how it can affect you.

In this age of technology, most medical information can be stored electronically, putting them at risk should any disaster occur.  From natural disasters to other catastrophes, there are many things that could happen that might compromise your patients’ files.  Ensuring business continuity is an important part of running a busy office and a disaster recovery plan is an important part of that continuity.

By understanding the classifications of disasters and the proper ways to prepare for them, you’ll be able to enact and effective plan that will protect your practice and your patients.

One category of disaster is a natural disaster like floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, or earthquakes.  Because there is no way to prevent a natural disaster, the best thing you can do is prepare for one.  The second type of disaster is a man made one, like hazardous materials spills, bio-terrorism, or infrastructure failure. Creating and implementing a disaster recovery plan is the only way to ensure your medical practice will be protected, no matter what type of disaster might occur.  You can follow simple and easy-to-find steps for creating your plan that can help you protect all facets of your business.

Implementing a disaster recovery plan is imperative to the success of your medical practice.  By protecting your patients’ files and crucial information, you’re able to give them the level of service they expect from a medical professional. Because protecting your patients is the most important part of being a medical professional, it’s important to take all necessary precautions when it comes to their files and private information.  Enacting a plan like this will protect your files no matter what type of disaster arises.  From natural disasters to man made ones, there are many things that could happen to put your practice at risk, so it’s important to protect it.

As much as you can protect your IT infrastructure and the data you store on behalf of your company and your customers and clients there is always the possibility, no matter how small, that something could go wrong. That is why it is essential any business prepares for the possibility and invests in good back up and disaster recovery planning.

Employing the services of an IT support company to not only install and maintain your IT infrastructure but to create reliable back up and disaster recovery plans is a good way to defend against a breakdown.

The first step in disaster recovery planning is to create a priority list of what is important to keep the business running in conjunction with your IT support. That way they will know how you want things handled in the event of an emergency. This could be your email systems, your online payment systems, computer equipment or database recovery.

You will also need to consider how to inform your employees about the disaster, how to instruct them on what to do and how to handle your customers and reassure them that you can still provide the service they are used to.

Regularly reviewing your disaster recovery plan is a must, including the way in which you put preventative measures in place. How do you handle your back up, storage and data replication, is your hardware maintained as regularly as it needs to be, are your staff updated on policies and procedures? View your disaster recovery plans as a constantly evolving document, one that will need to be modified as your business changes and grows.

Think about regularly testing your policies and procedures. Your business IT support can set up a testing procedure and ensure that key performance indicators are met. This will help you to find any weak points in your plan and create solutions. If you don’t regularly test your disaster recovery then you could find it isn’t worth having at all if an emergency hits your IT infrastructure.

Obviously backing up your data is an essential part of any recovery plan, but many companies consider onsite back up enough. What if, though, the disaster hits and you have no way of accessing your onsite back ups? Now the benefits of offsite back up procedures become clear – too late.

Offsite (and onsite) back up should be carried out at least daily, but depending on the critical nature of the data in question a more regular back up should be considered. Try to determine how an acceptable time period for a loss and subsequent recovery of data and plan accordingly. If you need your database recovered within one hour – and the information cannot be more than an hour old – your back up procedure and disaster recovery plan should reflect that.

Of course, it’s not just hardware that can fail and cause an IT emergency. Companies can be the victim of both hacking and viruses and any plan needs to consider these. For the latter, a robust, regularly updated and regularly tested anti-virus installation should be enough to ensure you’re not infected via email or internet. Ensure your in-house IT team or outsourced IT support stays on top of this. Defending against being hacked, having your computer system broken into and your data put at risk, is more complicated but just as important.

Here you need to consider file security, encryption and intrusion detection. An outsourced IT company is best placed to advise and implement these preventative measures.

By planning for the worst you will often avoid it all together, so don’t consider it an unnecessary expense – it could save you a fortune in the long run.

Data can be restored immediately to either the original server or an alternate server. Restores can also be redirected to an alternate physical location if the original office is no longer available. The server disaster recovery solution lies in having devices and technologies available which allow us to restart the vital information systems in a shorter time period than the estimated critical. These mechanisms, and all the associated plans of actions, are known as data disaster recovery.

Why should I have a data back up and recovery system!
By not having a data center disaster recovery plan, you are quite simply, putting your business at risk; don’t take chance with your vital data. Would you leave any other aspect of your business to chance? Not really. Always be prepared for a natural calamity or any disaster, don’t leave any if’s and but’s, leave no stone unturned when it comes to backing up your important data.

Care should be taken while selecting a data disaster recovery services.  The reason being your computer backup systems are the core piece of every data center disaster recovery plan. That is why your computer backup system must posses the ability to accommodate online computer backups for the most efficient protection.

Have a back up of your important programs, files, and applications as your priority. For the best protection it is imperative that your computer is backed up. Back up your data to an online server. What will your software systems do to automatically and quickly get your users back online? Data disaster recovery plays its vital role here.

How do I find the best data recovery services?
You can begin the work of finding the best data recovery expert by asking people around. Check with your colleagues to find who their data recovery services provider is. If you have already short-listed some experts, the next step is to check their experience in the field. Prefer to choose a service provider who has a minimum five years experience in the line. Also, find out his record of accomplishment for performance.

Always identify the risks to critical business information that may not be addressed by current disaster recovery plans; Optimize the value of the current backup and recovery infrastructure. New or improved processes to enhance overall disaster recovery capability are advisable. Resort to a reliable online Data Disaster Recovery. Bank on cost-effective remote backup and data disaster recovery solutions.

Dependence on information technology requires judicious disaster recovery planning to ensure survival of unplanned risks.  Planning for threats not known allows companies to efficiently make decisions in high stress emergency situations that contribute to the safety of employees, and reduce downtime of mission critical services and data loss.  According to Jim Hoffer, “only 6 percent of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss survive, while 43 percent never reopen and 51 percent close within two years.”  A thorough disaster recovery plan can reduce, if not prevent data loss in catastrophic situations that often lead toward business failure.

The process of developing an effective disaster recovery plan follows a similar structure to the systems developments life cycle and proceeds as follows:

Organizational Strategic Plan
Analysis
Design
Implementation
Testing
Maintenance

It is important to take time to thoroughly complete each step in order as they are interdependent and look at different aspects of disaster recovery.  Disaster recovery planning should also be an interactive process with other members of the disaster recovery and IT teams to encourage input from multiple areas of experience and expertise.

The organizational strategic plan assesses which areas are most critical to business.  For example, recovering email and other communication services is far more important than ensuring all printers are operational.  Indentifying important assets aids in determining how to react to specific disasters and recognize areas of greatest threat.  Upon completion of an organizational strategic plan, a company should have a list of important assets with associated importance rankings.

Analysis considers how the company is affected by different threats and risks.  Some risks require more consideration than the same risk for a different company.  A company in San Diego may give a great deal of attention to earth quake preparedness, whereas a company in Fort Collins would me more concerned with ESD and lightning strikes.  To generate the most accurate and complete set of risks as well as their impact and importance, a brainstorming approach is often used where those involved in the disaster recovery process meet and write down every possible risk or threat.  Later this exhaustive list is reduced by eliminating risks that unrealistic, such as the sun exploding.  Also, risks can often be removed from analysis if they have a probability of greater than 90 percent or less than 10 percent, or an impact that is low enough to not be of concern.  If the probability is greater than 90 percent, the event is assumed to happen and a task must be created to mitigate the impact.  When evaluating the impact of risks, it is also important to look at the worst-case scenario and define the scope of the risk.  The product of analysis is a requirement recovery document which describes “the distinction between critical and non-critical IT systems and information, each possible threat, and the possible worst-case scenarios that can result from each disaster” (Haag and Cummings, p.328).

The next phase in creating a disaster recovery plan is the design phase.  In the design phase, a formal disaster recovery document is written which includes detailed plans and actions required to recover the company from risks identified in analysis.  The plan created in this phase should also identify important information such as who is responsible for what actions, where backup information is kept, emergency contact information, backup site locations, and other details.  According to Haag and Cummings, a disaster recovery cost curve should be used to determine the most cost efficient disaster recovery solution (p. 329).  Careful attention in this phase will reduce the amount of time spent in the remaining phases.

Implementation requires that the disaster recovery plan be distributed and put into action.  Depending on the scope of the disaster recovery plan, additional equipment and services may need to be purchased and employees trained.  The plan will not be functional if the required infrastructure is absent.

Like fire alarms and preparedness, a disaster recovery plan needs to be tested periodically.  Testing a disaster recovery plan keeps procedures fresh for employees and helps to identify areas of weakness and vulnerability.

Lastly, a disaster recovery plan needs to be maintained.  Areas identified as lacking, changes to information contained in the disaster recovery plan, and changes made within the company all need to be updated in the disaster recovery plan.  Many companies have disaster recovery plans; however, because they are not maintained and updated, will likely be discovered to be marginally useful during a disaster.

In summary, disaster recovery planning is essential to the success and survivability of companies that rely on information technology.  An effective disaster recovery plan allows companies to effectively react to disasters in order to reduce data loss and downtime of critical services, and improve employee safety.  A carefully designed disaster recovery plan can help prevent business failure that often results from disasters.