6 Items for Your Disaster Recovery Checklist
For risk mitigation, higher education must now consider the cloud.
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Many institutions rely on outdated business continuity procedures, weak disaster recovery plans and loose information security protocols, making them vulnerable to accidental data loss.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.