To ensure disaster recovery and backup strategies are on par with today’s best practices, IT teams should create a plan to protect their company when disaster strikes and ensure they can resume key business processes quickly. Andrew Kahl, CEO, BackBox, discusses a few steps to create such a plan.
It is best practice for IT managers and their teams to have disaster recovery and backup plans in place, especially considering the increasing volume of network outages and security breaches organizations are facing. But with today’s ever-changing network environment, are the plans you currently have in place truly enough? On its own, simply having a plan is not an indication a company is prepared to recover from an outage quickly.   Â
To ensure your company’s disaster recovery and backup strategy is on par with today’s best practices, your IT team should follow the checklist below to create a plan that protects your organization when disaster strikes and ensures you are positioned to resume critical business processes quickly.Â
1. Ensure your organization is prepared for the worst
It is essential to plan and prepare for a disaster, making sure IT teams know the process and protocol for getting back up and running quickly. In the event your organization needs its network restored from scratch, that process is greatly improved through automation. No matter how talented an IT team is, relying on individuals to manually create and run scripts to restore your network is not realistic. Doing so introduces the risk of human error, especially when the team is under immense pressure to get the network back up as quickly as possible. Â
2. Confirm what is being backed up
IT teams should have a very specific list of what is being backed up, like creating backup instances of operating systems installed on networking devices, backing up all stored data and backing up network configuration files. Without such a specific list, there is too much ambiguity in the existing plan, and additional parameters are needed. In the event that your entire network needs to be restored, you cannot afford to overlook any components.  Â
3. Check how frequently backups are occurring Â
There should be a set cadence for how often regular backups are taking place as well as guidelines on what type of incident may trigger an ad hoc backup, like if there are any changes in configurations. It is also critical to assess whether the current cadence is enough or if backups should be happening more frequently. Â
See More: 7 Factors to Consider When Selecting a VM Backup Solution
4. Confirm what the configurations should be for all devices connected to your networkÂ
Far too often, the information on configurations exists in scattered fragments or only in the minds of specific IT personnel. To ensure a smooth recovery in the event of an outage and to increase the reliability of IT systems, this information must be carefully documented and automated. Everyone on the IT team needs to know what the “gold standard†is for all device configurations. You also need a solution that will enable your team to restore the network to this standard automatically in the event of a disaster, as well as keep the network in compliance with this standard on an ongoing basis.Â
5. Know what patches have been appliedÂ
Patch management is another aspect of network health that is often done on a very ad hoc basis and is poorly documented. Failing to stay on top of available patches will almost certainly lead to a security incident, as 87% of organizationsOpens a new window have experienced an attempted exploit of an already-known, existing vulnerability, according to Check Point’s study. It is critical to be entirely up to date on what patches are currently installed, know which updates are required for which systems and how to certify the patches have been installed correctly.Â
6. Review your recovery time Â
It is crucial to review historical data on the last several outages. Time to recover and overall efficiency should be improving. If it is not, adjustments still need to be made to the backup strategy, such as adopting tools like network automation for restoring the network as quickly as possible. Â
7. Identify authorized team membersÂ
Any member of your IT team should be able to run emergency operations in the event of a crisis rather than rely on a select handful of individuals to do the heavy lifting and make an impact. One of those individuals may be out sick, on vacation, or have just left the organization in this era of the Great Resignation. It is critical that a recovery operation can be completed quickly, efficiently, and by anyone you authorize. Â
8. Trusting the outcome
As IT teams plan and prepare for a disaster, it is essential to know if your recovery solution provides logs of the commands and function results and if these can be interpreted by everyone on the team. Rather than a complex, homegrown process known only to a few, implementing recovery with a series of simple actions ensures that the results will always be reliable and trackable.Â
The above steps will help IT teams validate whether current backup strategies are sufficient or if changes need to be made to ensure your organization is prepared for disaster. Perhaps your organization needs clearer definitions of what needs to be backed up, or you need to embrace automation so that your team is not scrambling to rebuild from scratch.Â
Regardless, following the tips mentioned above and creating an effective disaster recovery and backup will help you prevent outages and recover quickly in the event an outage does occur.
Following this checklist will help IT teams validate whether current backup strategies are sufficient or if changes need to be made to ensure your organization is prepared for disaster. Perhaps your organization needs clearer definitions of what needs to be backed up or you need to embrace automation so that your team is not scrambling to rebuild from scratch. Regardless, creating an effective disaster recovery and backup strategy is critical for organizations not only to prevent outages, but recovery quickly in the event an outage does occur.