Are your data backup procedures ready for primetime in case of a failure?
Imagine you’re the coach of a team playing for the Super Bowl. Over the past few years, you’ve relied on a core group of talent and systems to carry you to the promised land. But without your rock steady, hall of fame quarterback, you’d be home watching this game instead of playing.
Then the unthinkable happens.
30 minutes before kickoff, your all star quarterback is puking his guts out from some bad seafood the night before. The doc says he’ll recover: in 3 days. Now, the only thing standing between success and failure is your backup.
Just how good are your backups?
The worst time to find out how good your data backup procedures have been is when you need to recover from a SAP failure. Sadly, it takes many companies an agonizingly slow recovery event to realize how antiquated their processes have been.
If you don’t want that to be you, then you must examine your strategy for taking backups of your SAP and non-SAP production systems.
Now!
Your backup processes need some real game experience, pronto!
Just like an NFL team, if your backups never get any real game pressure playing time, they’re not going to be battle tested. You have to verify your backups work in case of a data center failure. If you want to be ready for a quick recovery, there’s no way around this.
With your thin budget, and odds of failure low, you might be tempted to wring a few more years out of your current processes.
Already have a backup process, and can’t afford elaborate recovery planning too?
That’s every IT director’s battle, isn’t it? But consider this. Why do you suppose the coast guard spends 8 hours a day practicing the same drills / situations day after day to save lives? Is it to just waste taxpayer money? No. It’s for when there’s an emergency, every one pounces to respond without wasting precious time.
For you, every minute wasted in recovery adds up to $100s - $1000’s of dollars per hour being flushed down the drain. So the real question is, can you afford not to make sure you have a flawless recovery process in place?
Don’t overlook asking for affordable help outside your company
There’s not a coach in the NFL who doesn’t spend the off season asking for help to shore up his team’s weakness. We’re not suggesting you spend your two weeks vacation working. However, there are scores of experts who specialize in helping you establishing the process of daily backups, periodic verification and audit of your backup/recovery process.
These experts can give you industry best practices for ensuring disaster recovery. And in some cases, even support you for establishing and running this procedure.
If you want the quickest recovery from data disasters as possible, then make sure your backup and recovery processes can flawlessly execute when needed. Whether you do that in house, or ask for help, you’ll find the investment now is a fraction of what a long recovery would cost you later.
Next Step
If you’d like some help putting these steps into practice, give us a call (or fill the form below and send to us). We’re happy to meet and discuss your situation.
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