Check recent backups to see if there are any issues. It’s important to know where things stand, and by reviewing your customers’ backups, you’ll know if there have been any networking errors or other issues that need to be addressed. Also, check to see how recently a full backup was run, and, if necessary, run another backup to make sure all of their data is being safely stored off-site.

Find out if data protection needs have changed. Ask your clients if anything has changed with their data protection needs and if they are currently backing up everything they need to recover in the event that their business is affected by a winter storm. This is also a good time to inventory your customers’ business processes. Find out if anything has changed in terms of the way the applications they’re using interact with each other. This can help you identify if your customer has any new applications that must be protected.

Define RPO and RTO. When setting up a BCDR plan, work with your client to set a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Ask your customer how much data they can afford to lose (RPO) in the event that a winter storm takes down their operations. Also, look at how soon they must recover (RTO) their infrastructure and applications after a winter storm outage to maintain healthy business operations. And when considering your DR options (for example, on-premise vs. cloud data backup, image-based vs. file & folder techniques, emergency power, etc.), work with your customer or prospect to balance business continuity resources against the cost of unplanned downtime and data loss due to a winter storm.

Formulate the DR plan. A DR plan you put in place for your customer should combine application availability solutions, data protection solutions, and policies and procedures for managing different scenarios. The best application availability solutions apply hybrid local-cloud architectures and software-based automation to spin up applications that fall victim to server failures, disk crashes, and other localized incidents. However, protecting against high-impact events, such as winter storm outages, may require image-based backups to the cloud.

Provide documentation. No DR plan is complete without clear documentation of the policies, procedures and personnel (including you) charged with carrying them out. It’s imperative that you track your findings, decisions and plans at every step along the way. Then, draft that information into a business continuity plan and share it with the customer’s key employees and stakeholders.

Test and review. It’s essential that you test your BCDR plan, preferably before the next big winter storm hits. Testing both backups and recoveries provides the ultimate assurance that the plan will meet your client’s required RPO and RTO targets. Finally, bear in mind that business strategies, workflows and processes evolve over time. For this reason, you need to schedule audits of the business continuity plan at least annually to make any revisions necessary to keep these operations up and running.