Disaster recovery is a hot topic these days in corporate board rooms. It’s for good reason too, as more and more companies are realizing the impact a loss of their data and/or applications could have on their business relationships. It used to be just the telephones that were the life blood of communication but in today’s ultra connected world data accessibility has become just as important.
For many IT executives and professionals, the pathway to identifying the right DR solution is not that clear. For others it’s a been a best effort approach and even if they have succeeded in implementing a solution it hasn’t been thoroughly tested, leaving an anxiety filled hope that it’s never needed.
In a recent article, Network Center Incorporated highlights some questions every business she be asking if considering a disaster recovery plan. These questions are a great primer to get the juices flowing and team members thinking in the right direction. If interested, click here to read the entire article. Even if you’ve already implemented a solution the right questions can help you tweak your over-all plan. In either case, a trip down this path could help you avoid the risk of your DR solution turning into what they refer to as an RGE, or resume generating event.
Here are some of the basics an operation should consider when creating a disaster recovery plan:
• Classify your data and/or applications on a three tiered scale to determine what data holds the highest priority in terms of availability.
• Once the priority data is identified, determine the impact to your business if that data is not accessible. This step may require you to place time factors around the impact to further determine an acceptable level of risk. As an example, would there be a financial impact to your business if that data was unavailable for a half day? What about a full day, or perhaps 2 or 3 if that’s what it took to recreate the data? Maybe an inability to access that data wouldn’t have an immediate financial impact but could compromise business relationships, ultimately leading to a financial loss as existing or potential clients interpret the event as a sign of unreliability.
• With an estimate as to the potential cost and impact to your business in the event of a critical data loss, you can now objectively evaluate recovery solutions. Maybe your company has multiple locations and a plan to duplicate your data to another site would suffice. Or, perhaps you’ve determined the cost and/or impact to be significant, warranting a robust vendor supplied solution that can guarantee against downtime.
There are numerous other questions to be asked when planning your DR solution, but these will get you started. I like to view these things through the phrase an old pilot friend of mine used to say, “fail to plan and you’ll plan to fail.” We all know Murphy hides out in the shadows just watching for that most critical moment to wreak his havoc, so avoid setting yourself up to be his victim by doing some good Q&A and laying out a good plan. Do that and you can be sure that your DRS won’t become an RGE…
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