A Trustworthy Recovery Strategy Requires a Few Things

A disaster can take many forms, from a raging snowstorm to deleting the wrong file. Regardless of what kind of disaster you face, you can know that it doesn’t take much to impact a business, especially if the business doesn’t have a business continuity plan in place. How does your business recover from such a devastating scenario? How can it get its data back and in proper working order? That’s what we want to tell you about today.

The Value of Infonomics

There is value in your business’ data, whether you realize it or not. The value itself depends on what you collect and who it’s from, whether it’s from vendors, clients, employees, or otherwise, but there is always value in what you store. Infonomics is the process of assigning a monetary value to the data so you have a better understanding of how much you lose when you suffer a data loss incident. Ask yourself these questions to determine the value of your data:

• How much capital would replacing the data cost? 
• How much and what percentage is your organization’s data?
• What kind of revenue could your organization see if it were to buy and sell it? 
• What will it cost to completely protect the data?

With these questions in mind, you should be able to determine the true loss you can associate with data disasters. To help you further gauge the impact of your data loss, let’s look at some deeper concepts you should know regarding your data loss scenario.

Data Backup

Obviously you need data backup in order to get back to work following a data loss incident. Many companies utilize comprehensive data backup systems that take snapshots of their data throughout the workday. This provides you with a tool to revert back to your infrastructure at any pivotal moments when data would be damaged or corrupted so you can hopefully dodge the ramifications of it.

Washington Works is of the mind that backup and disaster recovery systems should take incremental backups throughout the day and deploy to both a local network-attached device and secure, remote data center. This allows for total data redundancy that will ensure your data loss is minimal.

Disaster Recovery

The actual act of recovering data comes down to disaster recovery, which is a bit different compared to data backup. Data recovery is when you have a plan to deploy your backup in the hopes that you never have to actually use it. Here are some of the factors that contribute to a disaster recovery platform:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - The amount of time that your core business processes can be interrupted before your business begins to fail.
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - The amount of time your business can withstand interruption before it can be considered a complete break in continuity. 

You’ll want to ensure that you reach for specific metrics for both according to your business’ operations. The closer you can get these metrics, the better, as you don’t want to take any chances with your disaster recovery or business continuity. After all, each moment spent wasted during this process is a moment that could send your business hurtling toward destruction.

Washington Works can help your business implement the smartest data backup and disaster recovery solutions on the market. To learn more, call us today at 301-571-5040.