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Disaster Recovery for Churches (Fire, Flood, Ransomware)
Natural disasters can destroy all your data, but it’s often overlooked when churches set up disaster recovery. Many churches rely on a single person to help with IT support, which can work well for a short time until an incident happens. Disaster recovery is more than data backups in case of a data breach or data corruption. It’s also necessary in the event of a natural disaster like fires or floods. Church IT people usually prepare for cybersecurity incidents or data damage with basic backups. For example, an IT person might set up your environment where backups are stored on a local server.
Natural disasters can destroy all your data, but it’s often overlooked when churches set up disaster recovery. Many churches rely on a single person to help with IT support, which can work well for a short time until an incident happens. Disaster recovery is more than data backups in case of a data breach or data corruption. It’s also necessary in the event of a natural disaster like fires or floods. Church IT people usually prepare for cybersecurity incidents or data damage with basic backups. For example, an IT person might set up your environment where backups are stored on a local server. What they don’t prepare for are natural disasters that can completely destroy infrastructure that stores these backups. In the event of a natural disaster, your recovery options are limited. Insurance pays for the lost hardware, but it can’t replace data if it’s lost in a flood or fire. To better prepare your church for disaster recovery, here are a few tips. Building a Disaster Recovery Strategy Your first step is building a strategy. You can take specific strategies as a baseline and work with general guidelines, but the way you build out a strategy also depends on your users, current infrastructure, if you use any cloud resources, and the amount of data stored every day. Disaster recovery experts use general guidelines, but every strategy is also customized for each business. If you decide to work with disaster recovery professionals, they will first audit the environment for every resource. A risk assessment helps identify vulnerabilities and the resources that must be protected against data loss. For example, you might have a server onsite, so it must be included in backups and disaster recovery to restore productivity after an incident. A full disaster recovery plan includes a playbook to use after an incident. The incident could be a cyber-incident where systems must be locked down, a threat contained, and evidence collected to report to law enforcement. In a natural disaster, the plan would include a list of stakeholders to contact and any safety nets included during recovery. For example, you might pay for a cold or warm site where data has been replicated so that staff has a place to work while recovery is in process. A few items you will need to do for a disaster recovery plan: Business Impact for Each Asset Your church relies on certain digital assets more than others. For example, you can probably continue business productivity at a high level without a printer. If the printer breaks, you wait for a new one without much loss in revenue and service to your churchgoers. At the same time, loss of a central application that manages church resources like events and donations might have a much bigger effect. Business impact based on assets gives you a priority list. If you have a managed service provider to help with disaster recovery, the professionals you work with set a priority list for recovery. Higher priority assets will be recovered more quickly than others. It can take months to fully recover from a particularly nasty natural disaster. If you have a fire or flood that damages the premises, you might need to move to another location while recovery is on the way. Recovery in these cases is more than digital assets. You need to have the building repaired as well. In these cases, you might want to have a warm site with cloud resources as backup. Cloud infrastructure is available even after a natural disaster, so you only need to repair and replace local resources. What you do for backups, disaster recovery, and infrastructure to keep your church running even after an event, depends on your budget and current productivity processes. A professional managed service provider can help, but first you need a plan. A business impact covers: Determine Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) Disaster recovery depends on RTO and RPO. Recovery Time Objectives (RPO) determines the amount of between backups before it negatively impacts the church. You might only store data infrequently, so you can wait longer between backups. Some churches need several backups a day to stay compliant with their data recovery plan. RTO is the amount of time that can pass without recovery before it impacts data continuity. It’s possible for a church to continue operations for a few days ,even weeks, before a pen-and-paper approach affects business continuity. In cases of fire or flood, it’s likely that services will be down for several days, so working with a professional to ensure the quickest resolution helps with church business continuity. Most of the steps in previous sections also identify RPO and RTO, but here are a few ways professionals gather data for both RPO and RTO: How Churches Get Help with Disaster Recovery Building the right disaster recovery plan should be done by a professional to make sure your church is fully covered. Corporate Technologies can help. Our professionals have years of experience with disaster recovery, and we can help mitigate losses during and after a natural disaster. Contact us now to see how we can help your church. FAQs
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