Are Your IT Disaster Recovery Plans In Place?

You might think you have everything in order in case a disaster hits (manmade or natural). But if your IT isn’t secure and easily recoverable your business is in jeopardy. This is what a 500-person medical device company realized. What did they do? They called KalioTek™.

How To Prepare For An IT Disaster?

As with any type of disaster planning, when it comes to IT preparedness, you must plan for the worst. Whether an incident is caused by an accidental deletion of data or Mother Nature, you must ensure your digital information is secure and easily recoverable.

How Planning On One Company’s Part Prevented A Data Disaster

The CFO of a well-known medical device company asked us to perform an assessment of their disaster readiness. Their risk committee wanted to be sure that their IT infrastructure would be secure and recoverable under any circumstance.

Even though they have a small IT team, they needed more in-depth expertise to address this concern. This is a publicly traded company that sells globally. But they had the infrastructure of a startup company in many aspects. Plus, they didn’t have the manpower to take on the Disaster-Recovery (DR) project or other implementations.

KalioTek™ Provided The Help They Needed

We:

• Identified all critical systems, applications, and services.
• Assessed their IT availability and vulnerabilities.
• Determined the RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) that would satisfy business requirements in a disaster.
• Identified the risks based on different DR scenarios: single system failure, facility failure (server room fire), regional failure (earthquake) and more.
• Identified gaps, assessed different possible approaches and recommended solutions.
• Provided cost estimates and timelines for remediation.

Additional projects we handled included:

• • Completing infrastructure and process documentation.
  • Migrating email to the Cloud (Microsoft Office 365).
  • Setting up a cloud-based warm standby infrastructure for rapid recovery of critical systems.
  • Eliminating single points of failure through high availability (HA) configurations for firewalls, domain controllers and ESX virtual servers, and site-to-site VPNs (Virtual Private Networks).
  • Defining communication flow, including auto-attendant recordings, cell-phone forwarding and failover processes for customer service and other critical functions.
  • Planning for rapidly sourcing power generators.
  • Formalizing the detailed DR plan for business processes in a living document.
  • Testing, validating and updating the DR plan bi-annually.

The Result?

All of this gave their new CFO (a previous client of ours) the confidence that their risks are being professionally mitigated and they are maturing as an organization in ways required by a public company.

Are You Prepared For An IT Disaster?

You aren’t unless you maintain a continuous off-site, enterprise cloud-backup of your data, applications and server images.

Make sure your IT company has performed the following:

• Fully managed Backup and Disaster Recovery solutions
• A system-wide reliable backup
• Data Recovery with both physical and virtual data storage solutions
• Enough bandwidth to handle your backups and their recovery
• Secure IT infrastructure from end-to-end
• Proactive maintenance and remote monitoring with updates and patch management
• Connectivity between multiple data centers
• Ongoing testing to ensure the reliability of your Disaster Recovery solutions

With this, you can ensure your business in Silicon Valley/San Francisco is prepared in the event of a disaster.

Are You Updating Your DR Plan?

Disaster Recovery planning never ends. Your plan must be tested and updated regularly to align with network and business changes.

Your IT assets and data are a valuable investment. Make sure you’ve allocated sufficient time and resources to protect them in the event of any type of disaster.

The team at KalioTek™ can help. Contact us for a complimentary assessment of your disaster recovery needs.

Published On: 23rd October 2018 By: Mark Richards
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