When Disaster Strikes: 4 Tips to Protect Your Agency

Every organization regardless of size needs to be prepared to protect their core functionality should disaster strike.  In the wake of the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina, have you reviewed how can you protect your business should a disaster, sabotage or terrorism actually happen to your agency?

Gartner estimates that less than half of all mid-size businesses and only 25 percent of small businesses have disaster recovery plans in place. As part of its Smart Office initiative, HP joined with security industry partner Symantec to develop a “QuickGuide” as an overview of resources on how small and mid-sized companies can protect their businesses.

Here’s what they had to say:

1. Preparation and Prevention – Be prepared for whatever can happen. Many business conditions or mishaps can occur that will require time, money and effort to fix. These include: human error, security threats, natural disasters, terrorism and sabotage.  Be sure to consider the growth of your business or organization, how much critical data you have, the declining costs of storage and increasing use of mobile devices.

2. Response – Establish a contingency plan.

• Where will back-up data be stored?
• How will the critical systems of the businesses be kept running even in difficult times?
• What is the process of checking resources to find the problem?
• How will the problem be pinpointed?
• What hardware might have shut down?
• What security might have been breached?
• How will the problem be isolated, and how will it take to remedy?
• Develop a “response tree” listing problems and possible solutions.
• Distribute a contact list of known vendor partners to call in case the problem can’t be handled in-house.
• Provide list of actions to maintain basic business operations (email diversion, developing protocol for client and stakeholder notification of problem, finding and installing back-up software and files).

3. Recovery – Make sure to provide designated and protected back-up space and set up back-ups to run in off-peak time and in sufficient frequency to ensure minimum data loss in case of disaster.

4. Legal requirements – Understand local, national and industry legal requirements.

Adapted from When Disaster Strikes: 4 Tips to Protect Your Business.  Source:  http://www.melissadata.com/