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Unlike other natural disasters like earthquakes or wildfires, hurricanes making landfall can be forecasted with reasonable predictability — and we can say with near-certainty that they will happen in certain regions of the country every year. This gives IT organizations ample time to execute disaster recovery (DR) operations to keep data and applications safe. Despite this, many DR plans are insufficient, outdated, and untested.
Why should you care about updating your hurricane plan, and what can DartPoints do to help?
Disaster Recovery Planning As Prerequisite
A well-constructed hurricane response plan is important for helping your business restart operations effectively when unforeseen circumstances arise. As business leaders in charge of a company’s fiscal and operational growth, it’s the responsibility of executives to push for a strong, trustworthy plan to serve these objectives.
Simply put, it’s a competitive advantage to recover quickly from a storm. Through strong disaster recovery directives, being able to reduce recovery time puts you back in business before your competitors, strengthening your company’s reputation, boosting performance numbers, and improving customer service. This is all on top of financial efficiencies gained by avoiding the high costs associated with long recovery efforts. Excellent hurricane planning isn’t just a data backup issue, it’s part of a good business plan.
Over To IT Systems
For those organizations with strong hurricane planning directives, then the onus is passed on to the IT team to make sure it’s up to snuff. It’s a question of how comfortable you are with your current strategy and services. The plan should be updated regularly based on changes in technology or business priorities, which includes an evaluation of critical data and systems, an analysis of recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO), and a solution for each system, whether it be a hot, warm, or cold site recovery.
Through simulated disasters, failover run-throughs, and tabletop tests, you can identify deficiencies and adjust your plan as needed. Since there are so many moving parts, ensuring your plan takes into account extended downtime, surprise outages, and heavy equipment damage is crucial. Any gaps or uncertainties can have drastic results, so pre-planning from a technical perspective is paramount.
Develop a Disaster Recovery Plan with DartPoints
DartPoints knows all about hurricane planning because we’ve been there before. As longtime residents of areas with high hurricane risk, we’ve been through plenty of tough situations, from tropical storms to category 4 disasters—including Hurricanes Florence and Matthew at our Charleston location and Hurricanes Ida and Katrina at our Baton Rouge location. In each case, DartPoints clients maintained uptime throughout the events and their aftermath. From realtime replication services to VPN connectivity to private cloud recovery, we’ve been there and done that. These years of resilient experience are coupled with our geo-redundant locations, where data backups can stay in low-risk facilities away from danger.
If you’re looking for a partner to provide peace of mind before, during, and after a storm, choose someone who’s been through it before. DartPoints is there not only to help you prepare, but to get you up and going afterward. With your IT covered, you have the ability to focus on what is truly important during a storm: your family.
Ultimately, having a hurricane plan is an essential part of disaster recovery and business continuity. To learn more about DartPoints’ Disaster Recovery as a Service or colocation disaster recovery, click here.