Along with its cousin, business continuity, disaster recovery was something all businesses felt a pressure to strategise for, plan and test, with some larger companies even mounting full scale drills to check there were no holes in their approaches to keeping the business going if there was a natural disaster, terrorist attack or other emergency that made their headquarters inaccessible or destroyed their main IT infrastructure.

Why Disaster Recovery Lost Focus

Modern advancements addressed a lot of the things that disaster recovery and business continuity plans had to factor in. Thanks to cloud computing, offsite back ups no longer formed a major part of a robust business continuity plan. Smartphones and other improvements in remote working meant that staff could continue doing most if not all of their jobs even if your premises were taken out in a disaster. As technology we were adopting anyway answered a lot of our disaster recovery problems inherently, the whole topic became less fashionable in business and for many companies was either forgotten altogether or simply paid lip service to in a well buried policy document somewhere on the intranet.

Why Disaster Recovery Is Still Worth Planning For

While disaster recovery and business continuity is certainly easier now that businesses tend to store most of their vital records on the cloud, use web based business applications and have facilities in place for remote access, this does not mean that everything will automatically run smoothly. Even if, in creating your disaster recovery plan, you discover that you don’t actually have to change anything or put any new policies in place, simply having done the exercise and creating a plan will make everything feel more ordered and less panicked should you have to actually use it. A business continuity plan is not just about making sure you don’t lose data and everyone can regain access and keep operating, it will also include things like roles and responsibilities in the event of a disaster and communication plans. Staying organised and well managed so you can continue to provide a service to your customers requires more than just cloud back ups!

Audit Your Tech

Another point that is worth considering is that while you may ostensibly use things like the cloud, you may not use them for everything. While your website will remain in service even if a disaster strikes the server farm if you use VPS hosting (such as the VPS solutions from www.bestwebhosting.co.uk), and your customer data will be safe if you use a cloud CRM, there could be a whole wealth of files and information held on local computers that you’d be stuck without – perhaps not enough to stop the business functioning, but enough to set back projects. Auditing how you are utilising your tech and where there should be a push to get things onto the cloud is always, then, a worthwhile exercise.

Disaster recovery may be far easier than it was in the past, but that doesn’t mean it is trivial. Revisit your plans, or, if you don’t have any, create them. It can be a small exercise that can save a lot of headaches at a stressful time.