The global pandemic has presented all kinds of challenges for businesses, the majority of which have had to adapt to new ways of working to be able to survive. IT professionals have been at the heart of this to ensure business continuity. Now that things are beginning to open up again and businesses assess their future working plans, it’s important to revisit your disaster recovery plans and establish new best practices.

Coping with the demands of a changing workplace

Businesses had to adapt quickly to the demands of working in a pandemic. While many of these changes were expected to be short-term, the reality for many is that remote working will become a permanent option for teams. A growing number of businesses are planning to make remote or hybrid working permanent, which will have a significant impact on disaster recovery processes.

Managing a dispersed workforce presents a number of challenges for data recovery. From securing access to applications to data protection and communications channels, there could be fundamental changes needed to your disaster recovery plan to ensure your business or organisation can adapt to this ‘new normal’.

Review your risks

The first action you’ll need to take for your disaster recovery plan is to review your risks in light of current circumstances while focusing on the future. One of the biggest risks facing many IT departments is that with workers working from home, they’re using their home broadband connections (shared with other occupants across multiple devices), and potentially a lack of commercial-focused security protection. This leaves businesses vulnerable to cyber attacks, with phishing scams and video conferencing hacking even easier for criminals to carry out.

More and more businesses are moving their operations to the cloud, something that has been critical to enable remote working. However, not all cloud service providers will provide you with data recovery measures, which could leave you with some major problems should you experience an incident that impacts your data or operations.

Understanding the risks to your organisation, and what your data recovery measures are, will help you improve your business continuity plans to deal with any future crises.

Establish a clear communications plan

In addition to the new risks faced by your organisation, you’ll also have to navigate new communications plans to manage incidents when they happen.

Having your teams located in different places can make actioning your disaster recovery plan difficult, which is why an effective communications plan is essential. Testing your notification processes is essential, ensuring outages are communicated to the right people, so that appropriate action can be taken.

An effective business continuity plan should include various communications channels, including those outside of internal communications networks, ensuring action can be taken if business systems are compromised.

Testing your disaster recovery

Most IT teams carry out their testing on-site, making it easier to manage different conditions. But in the post-COVID world, wider testing will be needed to establish how data recovery is put into practice with remote working in place. How will remote access work in the event of an outage? Are there practical alternatives to cloud datacentres?

A robust data recovery plan should allow your business to operate even when critical systems are down. This is where working with data recovery specialists can ensure you have an effective plan in place that works with you to establish your risks and create a data recovery system that meets your RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective).

A fresh look at your data recovery strategy is essential as your business enters the post-COVID world. Data recovery will be a crucial part of your IT strategy, and should no longer simply be considered an option.

Disaster recovery with Anywhere

As businesses adapt to working in the post-COVID era, disaster recovery will be a key part of business continuity, ensuring your business is equipped to handle new and existing challenges.

With Anywhere Technologies, you can feel confident knowing you’ve got experts working with you to advise on your data recovery plans, ready to help you resume service if an outage occurs. We’ll work with you so that even in the event of a worst-case scenario you can be certain that the right measures are place to protect your organisation.. We can make sure your business is fully setup for disaster recovery, leaving you to focus on the things you do best.

Contact us today and let us get your disaster recovery plan in place.