Many organizations implement business continuity plans that are never tested. Enterprises should conduct a regular fire drill to make sure mission-critical data can be quickly recovered under the worst circumstances.

Many organizations pat themselves on the back for having the foresight to backup critical business data, but that doesn't mean they won't get caught flatfooted when a major disaster occurs. Business continuity plans need to be comprehensive, and more importantly, they need to be tested on a regular basis.

Enterprises, whether large or small, are all data dependent. Losing mission critical data means a major interruption to daily business operations and as a result, a damaged brand and unhappy customers. If the disruption lasts longer than a few hours, it can mean the end of your business.

The challenge faced by all organizations, even if they make a conscious decision to implement a business continuity plan, is understanding where all of their data resides, how to back it up effectively, and how to make certain it can be restored promptly if necessary.

Your Data is Everywhere

With more employees working remotely and the increased use of laptops and tablets thanks to the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) phenomenon, understanding where important data resides can be challenging. Implementing policies that govern how corporate data is stored on endpoints is critical to backing it up.

While mobile device management technologies can assist with policy development to an extent, any backup and data recovery technology you employ should take into account data on laptops, tablets and smartphones, as well as how often they are connected to the corporate network. Road warriors, for example, should not be able to circumvent regular backups, nor should those backups impede their productivity.

Redundancy Requires Off-Site Repositories

Building your own private cloud and operating your own data center may make sense depending on the nature of your business, but in most cases a true enterprise business continuity plan anticipates that you replicate your data to a secondary location, not just make copies that are stored in the same facility. While data loss is often caused by user error or hardware failure, serious disasters may physically wipe out your offices completely, destroying your data center and all of your data.

If your organization is made up of multiple locations, consider a secondary failover for redundancy and test the recoverability. It should be geographically far enough away that it's not likely to be affected by the same natural disasters.

Better yet, look to a third-party cloud service provider to safeguard your data and applications. While it may be technological feasible to own and operate your own date center, it may not be the best, strategic use of your IT staff. Look to a service provider that maintains enterprise class, secure and certified data centers that can provide you with excellent references and will allow you to kick the tires.

Test, Test and Test Again

Regardless of what approach you take to data backup and protection, a business continuity plan means nothing if data can't be recovered if the event of a crisis. Many organizations never test their backups until it's too late. Even if you're successful in implementing a data backup infrastructure, if lost data and applications can't be recovered easily and quickly, it may be already too late for your business.

Regularly schedule fire drills to test the effectiveness of your backups. Given the complexity of enterprise applications and the volume of data, there's bound to be areas that can be improved. If your test shows there are serious holes in your business continuity plans, take the opportunity to improve processes and backup technology where required.

Interested in getting some more information on enterprise solutions, Managed Hosting or cloud hosting articles? Visit Onxms.com.