Disaster Recovery Planning

When you think about your disaster recovery plan, does your tape backup system come to mind? Does the mere mention of disaster recovery make you a bit nervous? If so, you're not alone. Many businesses risk grave losses due to failures and disasters yet continue to depend on their tape backups to help them recover successfully should a major outage occur. The thought of implementing a more appropriate disaster recovery plan can be daunting; to the point where many simply push it off until later.
Unfortunately 'later' often ends up being after the business has suffered a major loss from which it could not recover.

Getting Started, it's hard!

Many SMEs do not consider that DR planning is for them; this may be because it is too difficult to think about where to start, or they think they don't have the resources to even start tackling such an area. Breaking things down into less formidable steps can simplify the process to get it completed more efficiently. From there you will have a solid basis from which to begin.

The five key actions outlined below will protect your business and ensure that you can recover your data so that you may resume trading within as short a time as possible if the worst happens.

1. Understand what keeps your business going

Identify those systems and resources that are absolutely critical to run the business and focus on protecting those first. Do not focus on which are the most costly, but those applications that are mission critical to the running of your business.

2. Get your data offsite

This is the quickest and easiest way to help ensure that the business can be recovered should it suffer a loss or outage. A hosted solution should be seriously considered as the most efficient way of ensuring your data is safe.

3. Calculate the cost of downtime

This will help in setting priorities as to which areas of the business get protected and to what levels. Note that while some systems may not have a large cash value associated with them being down, there may be legal ramifications should they not be available or recoverable.

4. Think outside the tape back up

Tape is still probably the most common method for protecting and recovering data, but it may not be appropriate or sufficient for all of your applications. Tape is acceptable for long-term archival and recovery, however, it can be a lengthy process to rebuild a system from tape.

5. Continue to build and test the plan - continuously!

Ensure that your plan accounts for the various types of outages that could affect each business location including a simple disk or hardware failure, a building outage, a regional power failure, environmental disasters, and natural disasters such as floods or storms. Make sure necessary procedures are documented and are made available for everyone to read and understand.

BOM IT Solutions has the experience and knowledge to simplify the above processes for you; from initial consultancy through to deployment and maintenance, you can be assured we are here to help.