Disasters, whether natural disasters or system failures, always come without warning, and can cause strong negative impacts on the company. Having a Disaster Recovery Plan is crucial for teams to know how to react and for your IT team to ensure business continuity under emergency situations.
It is very important that teams are completely prepared for a disaster. If your data center has been attacked or destroyed, there’s not much time for evaluating the situation. Everyone must know how to act. This is the reason why having a DR (Disaster Recovery) Plan is so important – so everybody is synched and knows exactly what to do. But what are the main topics to consider to help your IT team to deal with a crisis if something suddenly goes wrong?
Teams must be in line
There are different teams that need to be coordinated. For instance, the IT team and the customer support teams – that belong to different companies – need to be well aligned. They all must know what is happening and what must be done in order to ensure business continuity.
Testing and maintenance of the DR Plan
Additionally, it makes sense that some companies have a specific team to deal with the DR plan – developing, implementing, and maintaining the DR plan. Testing and maintenance of the plan are key to success – because the plan may change over time, as well as people, and even the software can be upgraded with new features and new databases – and this must be taken into consideration! The DR plan must be in line with all these changes.
Know what your critical data is
You need to identify the critical data or critical services to minimize downtime. In the case of a contact center, we know that all the configurations, the IVRs, the audios, scripts, databases, and our CRMs must be working as soon as possible. Of course, there are other types of data, like reports, that are important to recover…but that can be done afterward.
Thus, it is important to have the best synchronization solution to be able to put all the data and critical service in the second data center as soon as possible and bring it up with minimum downtime.
It is also important to engage with third-party providers! The DR plan does not only include the Contact Center solution but probably also other providers (for example, external CRMs), and all the teams must be engaged in the DR plan for a successful change to the new data center.
Operational impact
The operational impact might be minimized if you have a DR on the cloud. When an IT team has a disaster on their own structure (on-prem) they will be overloaded with software issues that must be brought back up and with people that cannot access their resources.
If you have a DR in a cloud, you can quickly change your resources over the internet and, in the case of a contact center, start answering some calls, giving some information to your customers, and minimizing the impacts you might be facing.
> If you would like to know more information about Disaster Recovery, namely on Contact Centers’ survivability in case of catastrophes, do not miss the opportunity to watch our webinar on the topic!