Many companies are embracing SharePoint as a content management system and using it to store terabytes of critical business information. While large organizations are more attuned to disaster recovery planning, many smaller companies (between 100 and 1,000 users) don’t have a SharePoint strategy that includes disaster recovery.
A successful SharePoint strategy for disaster recovery should combine planning and properly-sized infrastructure to ensure your content remains safe and accessible. First, you want to use redundant backups to secure your data against theft or accidental loss. Second, you want to make sure your SharePoint platform is accessible and ready to handle high availability. It’s a good idea to establish your expectations for availability and the metrics for monitoring your data and uptime, network accessibility, and computing resources.
As your content management system grows, make sure to avoid these two common mistakes in your SharePoint strategy:
- Lack of planning and monitoring of content growth: You might be expecting your SharePoint content to grow by 10 percent per year, only to see it grow by 1,000 percent. Ensuring proper monitoring of the growth of the content is critical in order to plan for appropriate sizing and recovery time.As more organizations use SharePoint, the amount of content they store in it grows exponentially. Unfortunately, recovering an entire database from SharePoint may be extremely time-consuming — it always takes longer than people expect.To minimize this recovery time, make sure you have continuous replication for your SharePoint content. If that’s not possible, your IT department should test the recovery time at least once a month to find out how long it takes to recover the content, especially when you’re under pressure.As an alternative, organizations can consider moving common workloads to SharePoint Online, which provides built-in scale and reliability.
- Failure to test your SharePoint strategy for disaster recovery: A SharePoint platform has lots of moving pieces, including databases, files, customization and other assets that go into building a great solution. All of these components need to be properly backed up and then tested for completeness, and the only way to truly test it is by conducting a recovery exercise and creating an environment that simulates an actual disaster.This testing should encompass all aspects of your SharePoint strategy. A major advantage with SharePoint is the ability to understand your usage and plan accordingly. Heavy load testing helps you understand how your system performs under pressure. Other tests are useful in simulating a variety of disasters, such as making sure the system is able to recover from the failure of a database, application or network. It’s a good idea to test the system at least once a month, and more often for critical content.
While backing up your data is important, that’s not enough to maintain business continuity. You also need to plan your response to different disasters and periodically test the viability of those plans. Without this planning, you could have all of your documents safely stored in the cloud and still lose access to your SharePoint platform for days on end. And if your system is available but inaccessible due to a network failure, it doesn’t do you much good.
Learn more about creating the right SharePoint strategy for your organization by contacting Portal Solutions.
