A lot of businesses rely on software to maximize efficiency. With the advent of Software as a Service (SaaS), it has become even easier for companies to do their work, but there is always that risk: hackers and other miscreants can make life difficult or even shut down your company. Here, we discuss the details, and merits, of having an effective SaaS disaster recovery plan.

SaaS businesses are facing more problems than ever before, and it’s time to prepare for disaster.

This post will offer some insights on how you can come up with a concise plan that is flexible enough to suit your needs. We got you covered in your SaaS disaster recovery plan.

 

Analyze the Business Impact

When developing a SaaS disaster recovery plan, the first step is to assess your current situation. This includes people involved, your development environments, and all other vulnerable areas. Analyze any and all factors that can bring your products and services down, as well as natural calamities with various levels of risk or severity ranging from minor power outages to tornadoes destroying everything.

Every 39 seconds, a hacker launches an attack. Risk assessment is important to avoid future calamities and it’s easy when you know where to start: company records of past events or a local list of calamities that have happened in the area.

Every detail should be documented.

Paperwork is tedious, but it’s also important in times of crisis. When something bad happens to your company you’ll be glad that there are detailed records about what needs to happen next. A SaaS disaster recovery plan document includes the tactics and aims for any calamity-related events; this list should detail who will do which tasks if a problem occurs.

It is important to have documented permissions so that in a time of crisis when decisions need to be made quickly, people with the necessary permission are able to make those decisions. Click To Tweet

This will help minimize confusion and lead towards quicker recovery.

Keep Everyone Smart with DUMB

An outside, malicious cyberattack is a problem. However, the most common vulnerabilities (that those malicious forces exploit) are lacking security measures or poor practices from your team and users. Leaving your computer unattended in a public place or not logging off of one while using an open wifi connection could be giving them access to our network.

A disaster recovery plan can be made clearer by using the DUMB system. This stands for Doable, Understandable, Manageable, and Beneficial processes to keep team members clear on what steps they need to take when a crisis arises. Educating employees about Malwares is important because there are so many different types of malware out there that it’s impossible not to know which one you’re dealing with.

Consider the cloud

There is a real thing called DRaaS (disaster recovery as a service). These services work in different ways, but they all have some common benefits. For example, the customer’s data can be copied to “virtualized failover systems” or on-site backup servers for increased simplicity and reduced costs.

Remember to create a communication strategy.

In order to ensure that a SaaS company is prepared for any disaster, it’s important to establish communication channels. Establish who needs the information and how you will get in contact with them if something goes wrong.

When it comes to a SaaS disaster recovery plan, I recommend that you create a communication tree as the organization moves forward with collaborative incident response efforts.

Continue to innovate.

You may think that your fire drill plan is airtight, but you won’t know for sure until it’s been tested. The internet changes at a rapid pace and what was popular yesterday might not be today- which means no matter how well planned out the recovery process is, something could go wrong if there are errors in execution or oversight during testing.

A SaaS disaster recovery plan is something that should be tested often. Testing the process not only helps to identify any issues with your backup but also makes those involved more aware of how serious an internet incident can really be.

Make resiliency a priority.

It is important to prioritize resilience as a guiding principle in your SaaS company. This can be done by minimizing the risk of failure and providing support for business needs. One way to do this would be to prevent single points of failures from happening, such as if an application only runs on one server.

So, in order to be better prepared for the next disaster that strikes your company, it is important to evaluate both software and hardware resilience. Click To Tweet

Backup generators can minimize downtime risks while failover connectivity will help if one server fails.

Conclusion

Though we hope that SaaS disaster recovery is never needed, it’s important to have a plan in place. With the rise of worldwide attacks and the increased frequency of disasters, you should always back up your backups and be ready for anything.