The recent heavy rain in Cayman has been a stark reminder that the hurricane season is not over yet.

It's important that your business does not underestimate the importance of having a business continuity strategy in place.

Those of us living in the hurricane belt are well-aware of the potential hazards a storm can bring. For a business, damage to property, paper records, digital data and disruption to overall business activity are very real possibilities. The most likely concerns are water damage and communications failure, both of which are fairly easy to avoid with proper storage and reliable backup procedures.

Protecting your information assets

Information is the lifeblood of an organisation and it’s important to make sure that the information is backed up and secured. Most organisations will have a hurricane plan with strategies in place to protect both people and property. But it's vital that these plans incorporate your information assets. These plans should also be reviewed regularly. It’s very easy to become complacent during the good times but keeping on top of your disaster recovery plans is a must.

Building a comprehensive strategy will ensure that information assets are protected. This not only helps minimise the risks and losses associated with a disaster, but will help return a business to normal as quickly as possible. It is human nature to hope for the best but it’s good sense to plan for the worst.

Back-up and protect

Together with looking at protecting information, businesses should also consider how records and critical information systems are stored and backed-up.

Backing up data is a necessary process to ensuring business continuity. The traditional approach of physically backing-up data and productions systems to a tape and then storing at a separate location is a risky approach. Data is backed up, but what about applications to run the data? What if the tape was damaged or destroyed?

This is one of the reasons more and more companies are adopting the Cloud. With the Cloud, companies no longer need to store systems in-house and can in fact remove their own servers altogether. A significant consequence of moving a company’s operations to the Cloud is that the business will automatically have a disaster recovery and business continuity solution in place.

With Ignition, data and company specific applications are also copied between multiple data hosting centres. This means that should one centre go down, data and applications will still be available.

Whether your business is a small startup or a multi-regional organisation, the benefits of using the Cloud as part of your business continuity solution is clear.

It's never too late!

Overall, the important thing to remember is not to become complacent about your business continuity plans, especially at the tail end of the hurricane season. It’s never too late to look at or review your disaster recovery strategies

For more information on business continuity solutions

email services@ignitionmsp.com.