Many business operations rely on the Office Suite of programs that include such mainstays as Outlook, Excel, Word and SQL servers. To create and implement a functional Operations Management Program you not only have to be able to plan for work flow, asset assignment, resource allocation and training, but provide a solid recovery plan as well. Failure to have data recovery procedures in place can tie up manpower and technological resources in ways that you do not wish to explore.
Know your resources
The first part of forming a recovery plan is to know where your resources are being consumed. This is not referring to what department is using what equipment or supplies, but what program operations are consuming resources on your system. One of the elements to recovery is risk mitigation. If you know that your SQL programs are sharing space with compilers or vector rendering programs, then you need to focus tools to restore SQL in that area. It won’t make sense or help to train everyone or to place the program access in the wrong department. You want to make sure that the people who will need the program the most can get to it the fastest and know how to use it. Regular training should go hand in hand with updating the versions of your operating and recovery programs.
Know your priorities
If you have a system-wide shut down due to power outage or interruption, chances are the data for all of your programs is going to become corrupted and need recovery. You need to already know the priority of the data to know where to focus IT efforts. Generally, when it comes to Operations Management, the primary data sets will be within your contact and tracking documents. This means that working to recover Outlook and repairing Excel data is going to take precedence over bringing back online the graphical files for marketing. Another common high priority is SQL recovery. Many schedules, contracts and necessary documentation are created in this program and returning the files to full access should be at the top of your list.
Know what to do
Every company needs a procedure manual in place that their employees are trained on for what to do in the event of a shut down and data access issues. Don’t make the mistake of going with an online version of this manual. Keep hard copies available and post simplified instructions in every workstation. Make sure to outline the basic steps of what to do to allow each program to attempt to use its proprietary recovery methods first before jumping into full scale recovery operations to avoid overwhelming your IT team.
DataNumen, Inc., is a world leader in data recovery technologies and is available 24/7 to help with data recovery and repair. For more information, visit DataNumen.