Organizations I have worked with typically find themselves lacking a disaster recovery (DR) plan for an assortment of reasons. They have never had an outage; Disasters are too numerous to plan for; It is too expensive; They have one - it is called backups; Etc.

Technology has evolved to a point where every company, big and small, now has access to affordable and effective disaster recovery solutions. It doesn't take much to protect your organization from extinction due to a disaster. The following are a few things to think about when devising your organization's recovery plan.

Do you have a disaster recovery plan?

If you do, when was the last time you tested your disaster recovery plan?

Are you aware that there are ways to test your disaster recovery plan?

An organization I worked with owned a site in New Orleans. Our disaster recovery plan was simple; It required that the General Manager transport the most recent backup tapes to a designated accessible sister site where IT would redeploy the site's data and applications. When Katrina hit, our disaster recovery plan worked flawlessly and we recovered within the prescribed RTO and RPO. However, the 37 employees that used that data to generate revenue for the organization were scattered around the country unable to conduct business leaving our customers with an inferior product. What good is a disaster recovery plan without an associated solid business continuity plan?

What is Common Data Service?

Common Data Service is a cloud-based data storage and management system that standardizes your data across business applications like Dynamics 365, Office 365, mobile apps, and Power BI. 

Your data is stored in standard (or customized) entities, similar to how a table stores data in database. If you use Common Data Service, your suite of business applications feed data predictably to these entities, allowing simple data sharing, data mining, and business intelligence.