If you have a system failure in your organisation, two important questions will come to mind. How long will it take you to get your organisation up and running again? How much downtime and data loss can you afford?

This is where business continuity should come into play as it’s where an organisation has planned and prepared how it can continue to operate when faced with major incidents or disasters. Your organisation continuity plan should have three core components resilience, recovery and contingency.

Resilience
You can increase your organisation’s resilience by redesigning all its critical functions and infrastructures with various disaster scenarios in mind. What this should include is staff rota’s and data redundancy. This will help you maintain essential services on and off site.

Recovery
You must be able to recover or restore critical and less business functions and this can be done by setting recovery time objectives for different systems, networks and applications. Recovery time objectives will help you prioritise what needs to recovered or restored first.

Contingency
Your organisation will have procedures in place to deal with whatever incidents and disasters might occur, including ones that could not be foreseen. Contingency preparations are only brought in to play when resilience and recovery arrangements have not worked.

When you start thinking about business continuity, you should also be thinking about your data and how it is backed up. Backing up your data can be done in three ways:

You only backup your data, and this is normally stored on a local external hard disk or in the cloud, but you could use both just in case you might encounter issues with your local external drive. If you only need your data back as quickly as possible then this is the backup solution that you should be doing, as backing up your data can be done daily.

You clone your hard disk which results in an exact duplicate of your hard disk being made. This is more useful when you need to reinstall an OS and any software needed, especially if you have a disk failure and you need your systems back on line yesterday. This will require you having one or more donor hard disks that will be used to clone your hard disk.

You make an image of your hard drive and this is where image backup software copies everything on your hard drive into a large compressed file which can be saved in the cloud or an external hard drive. Images can be very handy as you can store various images at the same time and this can come in handy especially if you have malware/viruses infecting your hard disk and you want to bring your last known good configuration.

Each of the three-backup solutions have their uses, but when you need to be up and running as quickly as possible you must choose which one suits you best and decide how often you will back up your data, clone your hard disk and make images of your hard disk.

iPing provide managed services and IT services and we can help you with your business continuity and how you back up your data. So, if you need some help with the above please contact us or give us a call on 01 5241350.