Best Practices for Cost-Effective Disaster Recovery

Disaster Recovery planning is a sensible practice, but the price of it can be intimidating. Some companies opt to have no disaster recovery plan at all for that reason, but this choice can end up costing a lot. If you aren’t ready, the loss after a disaster can take a much greater financial toll than the cost of being prepared. Below are some tips on how to create a more cost-effective disaster recovery plan.  

Recover or Close the doors

According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), almost 40 percent of businesses never reopen their doors after a disaster. Recent data from a CNBC/SurveyMonkey Small Business Survey also shows that most business owners don’t spend too much time thinking about the environment as a critical factor.

Remove Unused Assets

Getting rid of idle data storage and servers in your disaster recovery storage facility will lower spending. Not many businesses have the funds to put towards a facility that only has a portion of its assets in use. By cleaning house, in a sense, the money you would have spent on those unnecessary assets can now be used for other operations within your business.  The cloud makes for a better option, since you only pay for what you use.  Companies are replacing their legacy backup software and hardware with all cloud applications and for DR-as-a-Services. 

Automate

Automating processes such as data replication, system deployment, and host or application failover to the cloud can do a lot for lowering costs. In automating, you are able to improve reliability, simplify testing, and reduce the hours spent on the aforementioned tasks. The risk that comes with the possibility of human error is also reduced through this practice. With extra time and fewer mistakes from the process of automating, you won’t have to put out as many fires on a regular basis.

Virtualize Servers

One of the best ways to make a cost-effective disaster recovery plan is to make use of server virtualization. Virtualization takes care of eliminating unused assets and puts you on the path to full automation by making automated failover easier. Server virtualization can also potentially improve your overall disaster recovery service, on top of all that.

Optimize Your Data

By optimizing your data and lowering your amount of data storage, you are able to reduce the amount of bandwidth needed to replicate data to the cloud. This bandwidth reduction considerably decreases the cost of disaster recovery, allowing for your savings to be spent in other areas of your organization.

Document Your Plan

Without extensive documentation of your disaster recovery plan, you’re opened up to serious financial losses. When disaster strikes and no senior staff are available, comprehensive documentation of your recovery plan can be the difference between lengthy downtime and a simple fix by less experienced staff.

Though disaster recovery planning is expensive, it is necessary to keep businesses running smoothly. While you hope you’ll never need to put your plan in action, the cost of having no plan at all can be much greater than the cost needed to be prepared for disruptions. Regardless, being aware of how to bring costs down when preparing for disaster makes spending money on a plan that works for you simpler.