The importance of having a disaster recovery plan

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If your organization relies on custom software solutions, you need to consider how a natural disaster or other serious disruption would impact your operations.

While most large organizations have disaster recovery and business continuity plans in place, some small and mid-sized businesses overlook this critical step. Others may have a plan created in the past that no longer reflects today’s needs. If your organization depends on mission-critical systems for daily operations, you need to create a plan and review it regularly.

The good news is that disaster-recovery planning doesn’t have to be complex or difficult. Simply investing the time to discuss a strategy and put it on paper can make things much easier for you and your clients and stakeholders if an emergency does happen.

The first key step: Ask the right questions

A business continuity and disaster recovery plan starts with understanding how you’d respond to, diagnose, and solve issues related to mission-critical software.

For instance, many of our clients have custom solutions developed on Claris FileMaker. Here are some of the questions we advise them to discuss and answer:

Communication and procedures:

  • Is there a documented process for diagnosing and responding to crashes and outages?
  • Does this document include names of decision-makers and key vendors, their contact information, and when to call for help?

Backups:

  • Are you following recommended procedures for making and storing backups? (For FileMaker Server users, this includes both scheduled and progressive )
  • Are you testing your backups regularly to ensure they’re reliable?
  • If you host on-premises, are you augmenting physical backups or on-site servers with virtualization platforms or off-premises backup options?

Diagnosis and recovery steps:

  • Do you have a procedure for determining whether an issue is due to an application crash, a corrupt operating system or virtual machine, a hardware failure, or a FileMaker Server service failure?
  • Do you have a documented process for responding to each type of issue?
  • Do you know how to interpret error messages and locate log files to assist with diagnosis and recovery?

Notifying stakeholders:

  • In addition to your team, who else needs to be informed when a system goes down?
  • At what point do you inform other stakeholders or clients, and what information can you give them to help them prepare for any potential impact of downtime?

Keeping your operations running:

  • Do you have secondary tools or systems that can keep your organization running during downtime?
  • How will you ensure continuity of data between systems once your primary solution is back up and running?

What if your software is hosted off-site?

Many organizations rely on custom software that’s hosted by a third party. If that’s the case for you, be sure you have an operating plan in place for engaging with your hosting partner:

  • What tools do they provide for you to test connections to your service or diagnose potential issues? How can you test those tools to be sure they’ll work when needed?
  • In an emergency, what are your options for contacting them? — by phone, email, or online via a tool like Microsoft Teams or Slack?
  • If you don’t get a response, how do you escalate your request?
  • What is your application hosting provider’s service level agreement (SLA)? That is, how quickly will they commit to responding to an outage or other issue?

As your business grows or your needs evolve, you may want to consider whether your current application hosting is still the best fit. For custom solutions built on FileMaker, a number of hosting options are available including Claris’ own cloud hosting service. As a Claris Platinum Partner, we can help you evaluate the costs and benefits of different options and determine if on-site, third-party, or cloud application hosting would be the best fit for your needs. Reach out to our team with your questions and we’ll help you get started.

Putting your plan into action: Test, document, and improve

To quote President Dwight Eisenhower, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” Going through the planning process and preparing for a disaster is valuable, but if you don’t proof-test your disaster recovery plan, you won’t know if it actually works.

This involves regular training and reviews of procedures so that everyone knows how and when to activate the recovery plan. Communicating with your team and testing your plan to see how well it can be put into action will prevent delays and missteps in an actual emergency.

Regular simulations, random backup restore tests, and failover drills for critical servers can also ensure that your plan works as expected and that your team members understand their roles.

I can’t overemphasize the importance of testing your backups regularly, before you need them. Too many organizations skip this step only to find that their backups are corrupted, incomplete, or not being made frequently enough to avoid serious business impact.

Finally, when an issue does happen, be sure to document how well your plan worked and what improvements you can make.

Skeleton Key helps organizations of all types and sizes build not only software solutions, but workflows and processes that make them more efficient and resilient. We’re here to help you find the best answers to these questions and be ready for long-term growth and success. Book a consultation with us today and we’ll help you plan for the future.