Cloud

6 Items for Your Disaster Recovery Checklist

For risk mitigation, higher education must now consider the cloud.

Jay Atkinson is CEO of AIS Network, a secure cloud-hosting expert serving large organizations in education, government and healthcare.

Significant portions of the country are at risk for severe weather and other natural disasters this fall, yet too few colleges and universities have thought pragmatically about the potential consequences to their IT infrastructure.

Many institutions rely on outdated business continuity procedures, weak disaster recovery plans and loose information security protocols, making them vulnerable to accidental data loss. That can result in staggering financial losses and can severely impact productivity, reputation and the bottom line. It also threatens the security of students’ personal information, potentially exposing the institution to regulatory compliance troubles.

CIOs and IT managers can take steps to ensure institutional resilience, beginning with a solid continuity of operations plan — the institution’s post-disaster playbook for staying up and running. All plans should incorporate IT infrastructure safeguards, including specific backup and recovery measures.

It’s incumbent upon universities to have a secure backup and disaster recovery solution that meets the stringent requirements of FERPA, HIPAA, PCI and other applicable regulatory standards. Therefore, it’s critical to understand clearly where the cloud fits in and how it can help save time, money and resources.

Cloud recovery requires no travel and no extra hardware, yet offers extremely high reliability. Should disaster strike, a cloud solution allows continuously backed-up systems to be restored as virtual machines.

Identify the risks

List and categorize all natural and man-made threats and their impact on various systems. What would it take to knock out your entire network? How much unplanned downtime can your institution sustain?

Inventory I.T. assets

Which are most critical to maintaining business continuity? What’s your tolerance for asset loss? The cost of the response should be balanced against your tolerance for system downtime.

Define goals

Worst-case scenario, how long can your institution shut down? Does it need to recover offsite? Define goals in terms of Recovery Point Objective (RPO: How much data can we lose?) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO: How long can we be down?).

Develop a plan

Include an IT assets inventory; data protection procedures and contingency plans; notification and activation schedules; a list of roles and responsibilities; a resource requirements checklist; and details about training provisions. Good plans also include both maintenance as well as backup and recovery testing schedules.