National Preparedness Month and Disaster Recovery Planning

September is the beginning of the hurricane season and is also designated National Preparedness Month. Sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), National Preparedness Month encourages Americans to prepare for disasters in their homes and businesses. In this blog, we offer several business disaster recovery and continuity planning tips:

1. Plan Now

Natural disasters often happen with little forewarning, so get your plan ready now. Remember, every business faces unique local and regional risks. Assess weather, flooding, wildfire and earthquake threats within your state and municipality. FEMA has excellent resources for conducting hazard identification and risk assessment. Don’t procrastinate. Start making a disaster recovery and business continuity plan today.

2. Safeguard Paper Records

Paper records damaged by water, fire, and natural disasters are often unrecoverable. Yet, many companies store document inventories in flood-prone areas such as basements, under fire sprinklers, or near electrical outlets and equipment. A records center is built with concrete floors, walls and ceilings able to withstand extreme weather and natural disasters. A records center has advanced fire detection and suppression technology, and your documents are stored on specialized racking systems designed for their long-term preservation.

3. Back Up Your Data

A regular backup schedule protects your data from unforeseen loss. Create daily, weekly, and monthly backups to protect your data from ongoing threats and to ensure data restoration at any point in time. Implement a routine and stick to it.

Store your backup media in a facility that protects it from fires, floods, natural disasters and unauthorized access. Look for a climate-controlled data protection facility with fully-automated climate control, waterless fire protection, and monitored security systems. In a data protection facility, background-screened data protection professionals manage your media, ensure wear is evenly distributed on each device, and take old tapes and hard drives out of service before they fail. Your media is available to you at a moment’s notice to support your disaster recovery and data recovery procedures.

4. Test Your Plan

Keeping your disaster recovery plan up to date is critical. When a disaster strikes, you need to make sure your plan works. Re-evaluate your disaster recovery procedures at least every six months to determine their effectiveness. Involve your data services provider in testing to evaluate the data stored on your backup media and verify recovery time objectives (RTO).

National Preparedness Month is an excellent time to upgrade your organization’s ability to respond to and recover from a disaster.

For more tips on how to choose a document scanning provider, please contact us by phone or complete the form on this page.

DeVries Business Services proudly serves businesses in Spokane, Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho.

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