If you’re in business today in any capacity, you’re utilizing computer networks to some degree or another. This means you must have business continuity planning and secure cloud data backups in order to ensure your continuing, long-term functionality. There really aren’t two ways about it.
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You need to have a solid business continuity plan (BCP) tested repeatedly and in working order, so that if any disasters do strike, you’re covered.
Business continuity is much more than just a fancy word for “backup,” nor is it interchangeable with disaster recovery — although some organizations treat it that way.
A comprehensive BC plan provides a roadmap for continuance and/or restoration of mission-critical functions during and after a disaster, such as a fire, flood, tornado or even a disease epidemic that includes comprehensive business continuity planning and secure cloud data backups.
Your BCP must be thought out, written down, and distributed to key personnel well ahead of any incident that could cause a disruption to your operations. Copies should be stored off-site — an obvious (but often overlooked) requirement.
So, what should a good BCP plan cover? We’ve listed some key areas that must be covered (this is not a complete list):
- Potential-threat analysis. Your company’s response to a disaster will depend on both the nature and the extent of a given disaster. Some threats, such as a tornado or flood, may physically destroy your premises as well as your IT infrastructure.
Others, such as pandemic disease, affect human resources while leaving buildings and machinery intact. A cyberterrorism attack might bring down your network but not affect the functionality of the hardware or your personnel. A bombing may destroy both human life and network components. A power outage could render your equipment unusable, but cause no lasting damage. Hence, your plan should cover contingencies for as many threat types as possible – and also be able to anticipate which threats are the most likely, and in what order.
- Assign responsibility. A key component in any crisis management situation — which is what you have during and perhaps immediately after the disaster — is the assignment of areas of responsibility and establishment of a chain of command. This is no time to have department heads squabbling about who has decision-making authority. Remember that some types of disasters may result in loss of personnel (or some of your staff may be on vacation or out sick when the event occurs), so be sure to assign alternates in case some of the important players are not available.
Training of key personnel in disaster preparedness, incident management, and recovery should also be addressed.
- Off-site data backup. This is a big one – indispensable, really. Any good business continuity plan will address restoration of your company’s important digital data if its main location is destroyed. All too often, organizations will meticulously make data backups of everything and then store those backups in their on-site server room.
But, if a tornado, flood, or fire destroys the building, it will destroy that often irreplaceable data as well.
Instead, you should store copies of important data on removable media that’s kept at a different physical location or back it up over the Internet (secure cloud backup) to a remote server, or both. Just as important, key personnel should know where it’s stored and have the keys, passwords, etc., to be able to restore it to get users back to a productive state as soon as possible in the wake of a disaster.
Veeam and Microsoft Azure Site Recovery – Two of Our Key BCP Tools
We work with Veeam Cloud backup and Microsoft Azure Site Recovery tools to provide our customers with lasting BCP assurance. Veeam Cloud Connect makes it easy to extend your backup infrastructure to the cloud, and also makes it easy for managed service providers like us to offer hosted backup repositories or complete backup services with Veeam products.
Veeam Makes Extending Backup to the Cloud Easy
Everyone needs a place to store their backups off-site. But many organizations don’t have a second site, and rotating tapes or removable media off-site is cumbersome. Increasingly, business owners are turning to the cloud as a more reliable backup alternative.
Veeam Cloud Connect integrates hosted backup repositories (called cloud repositories) directly into the Veeam backup console where:
- Our customers simply click “Add Service Provider” and enter the credentials we’ve given you.
- Your cloud repositories appear in your backup infrastructure.
And, as those IT-savvy types know, disaster recovery is a key part of business continuity. That’s where Microsoft Azure Site Recovery comes in, which facilitates disaster recovery plans through:
Automated protection and replication of virtual machines
- Remote health monitoring
- Customizable recovery plans
- No-impact recovery plan testing
- Orchestrated recovery when needed
- Replication to—and recovery in—Azure
Just let Intivix guide you to ideal BCP and data backup conditions with Veeam and Azure!
Ready to learn more about how to get business continuity planning and secure cloud data backups that work for you? Then, download our whitepaper called, “How to Prepare for Business Continuity After a Disaster,” and contact us at (415) 543-1033 for more info on getting started.
Orchestrated Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
We use Azure Site Recovery to automate the recovery of services when a site outage happens at a given primary datacenter. We bring over applications in an orchestrated way to help restore service quickly, even for complex multi-tier workloads. We can more easily create disaster recovery plans in the Microsoft Azure classic portal, where they are stored.
The disaster recovery plans (DR plans) can be as simple or advanced as your business requirements demand, including the execution of custom Windows PowerShell scripts and Azure Automation runbooks, and pauses for manual interventions. We can customize networks by mapping virtual networks between the primary and recovery sites, and test disaster recovery plans anytime without disrupting the services at our clients’ primary location.
In this way, we can ensure more resilient and capable business continuity protection and secure cloud data backup services for our clients!
Add to that our cloud hosting, cloud servers, and private cloud capabilities, and you have a fully-fledged data security and continuity facilitator in Intivix – the “Best Cloud Service in San Francisco” as some have named us.
Isn’t it time you discovered total data backup and security for yourself?
Secure Cloud Data Backups and Business Continuity Are Just Part of What We Do
Why choose Intivix over other data backup and business continuity providers? In short, we have all the IT tools you’ll ever need to ensure your business’ ongoing productivity and success.
Wonder how your business will survive an earthquake shakeup? This “earthquake drill” event should answer that question and others regarding BC planning. Let’s talk in person about it at our Great California Shakeout event at Destino Latin Bistro on Friday, Oct. 27 from 4-7pm.
Be sure to register for the Great California ShakeOut Event we’re hosting and find out more about how we can help your business survive any disaster.
Reserve your place now, so you can get the invite back, and call an Intivix representative at (415) 543-1033 or send an email to [email protected] if you require more info about this event, or business continuity planning and secure cloud data backups in general.
