Between more frequent fires, hurricanes, and other extreme weather events, ensuring that your company has an up-to-date disaster recovery plan is more important than ever. In addition, if you still manage a large number of business-critical systems from an internally managed data center, you might want to consider cloud services as another line of protection against hardware failures and natural disasters.

Whether the weather is dry or wet

With California moving into a year-round fire season and coastal areas like Florida, Texas, and the Carolinas facing hurricanes with unprecedented wind and flood damage, businesses of all sizes are evaluating their disaster recovery plans against the reality of a more unpredictable environment.

In the United States, there are no reporting requirements for states on the costs to repair after a major disaster — although we know that federal funding for natural disasters was nearly $140 billion in 2017. As these extreme weather events get more frequent or affect areas with significant business infrastructure, these costs will only continue to rise.

Major data centers tend to be located in areas with low risk of natural disasters, like Nevada and Utah. Facebook’s first data center is in Oregon, where the biggest threat to its integrity is a terrible snowstorm. If your cloud provider is backing up your data in a low-risk area — which is always a good question to ask when you’re looking at providers — at least one copy of your data will be safe even if the primary server is in a more high-risk area.

When we talk disaster recovery, we often talk about services outages or hardware failures. But unintentional, everyday failures and major weather events should be a concern for all businesses when they refresh their disaster recovery plans and protocols.

The cloud is all about automated backups and ease of access

If a major outage or disaster closes your physical office, cloud services accessible from anywhere can help maintain your business continuity no matter what the situation is on the ground. Any loss of local services becomes a simple hardware replacement, rather than the loss of terabytes of data.

But if you’re going to include cloud services as a significant portion of your disaster recovery plan, you need to prepare yourself, your team, and your company for the planning required to develop a good recovery plan. Before you sign any service-level agreement (SLA) with a cloud provider, you need to first understand the provider’s role in the event of a disaster — including protection they have for their own centers and your company’s responsibilities in a disaster situation. This means:

• Getting your current contracts in order so that you understand your present situation and future expectations
• Going over disaster preparedness and access options if this isn’t part of your normal plan
• Reviewing recovery services
• Discussing regular audit reports with your vendor
• Including your vendor in your disaster recovery efforts
• Understanding the vendor’s standard SLA and its references to disaster recovery

Building a relationship with your cloud partner and taking steps to ensure you’re looking for an active partner in disaster recovery can set the stage for success when an extreme event does arise. In addition to following my suggestions above, you should work to establish clear lines of communication on both ends of your vendor-company relationship.

Where the cloud fits into your disaster recovery plan

Once you have a vendor that can accommodate your disaster recovery needs, the next step is making sure your recovery plan is up-to-date and easily accessible. Good disaster recovery planning typically includes:

• The recovery time objective (RTO) for getting an application back online
• The recovery point objective (RPO) to define the longest amount of time you can’t access data after a major incident
• Your specific recovery goals for a variety of situations (data loss, hardware loss, extended absence from a physical location, etc.)
• Cleanup processes
• A list of specific tasks to be completed pre- and post-disaster
• Backup software for installation
• Configuring your security and your employees’ ability to access the secure disaster recovery system environment as needed
• Daily or weekly cloud backups, to reduce the loss of work in the event of a disaster

These are just a few components of a successful disaster recovery plan, but they are a good place to start as you work on incorporating cloud services into your business continuity plan.

Another opinion can be incredibly helpful when you’re preparing a disaster recovery plan. The Windsor Group can help you assess your options and find the best solution for your business. Click here to get started with a strategy session.