Saturday, July 12, 2014

Your Disaster Recovery Plan

By Frankline Bell


While disaster may never strike your business, if some type of catastrophic failure affects your company, you need to feel confident that you have a plan in place to deal with the consequences. A disaster could include anything from an earthquake or flood to some type of man-made catastrophe such as a fire. Knowing that you have a business continuity plan in place brings a great deal of peace of mind.

Your business continuity plan can be just as important as any other type of business planning. In general, these plans contain five elements, some of which deal with what employees should do in variety of crises and some are created to handle information technology issues. One part of the plan will focus on employees and what they should do and where they should go in case of many different emergencies. This is called an occupant emergency plan, and this can help with evacuations or how to handle disasters and other types of emergencies.

Of course, you will want as little interruption to your business as possible no matter what type of crisis you face. Two parts of the continuity plan account for this, and they include a continuity of operations plan and a business resumption plan. These will ensure that you can continue dealing with client issues or at least get back in business as quickly as possible. Your employees and managers also will have an easier time dealing with a crisis if there is a plan in place. This provides a sense of security and lowers the stress level.

For so many businesses, most of the crucial information is stored on computers or perhaps in cloud-based software. When problems occur with your technology, you need a plan in place to deal with these issues. One part of the business continuity plan will be an incident management plan. This plan will provide employees with steps to take in the event of many different types of incidents, from a minor power outage or a problem with hardware or software or perhaps a company-wide technology problem. If the problem is extremely serious, then the fifth part of your continuity plan will be utilized and this is your disaster recovery plan.

While you can create these plans yourself, it is often wise to have an IT consultant create these plans and offer out-sourced IT management. An IT consultant can handle all of your technology issues and create a plan that is tailored to your company. Every company is unique, so each business continuity plan also must be unique. In addition to creating these plans, your managed IT support provider also can consult with you concerning ways to improve your overall information technology plans and strategies.

If you need managed IT services in Portland, Always On IT can help. Our IT consultants offer business IT services for Multnomah County and business IT services for Washington County and the entire Portland metro area. In addition to creating your business continuity plan, we can create a business IT plan specifically for your company and offer full IT support, including computer repair, computer updates and all types of support.




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