Disaster Recovery

What is Disaster Recovery?

Often, our perception about disasters is something spectacular in nature, occurring once in 25 years with an impact so huge that it is futile planning for it.  However, reality is quite different.  Any event that has the ability to prevent your business from operating efficiently is a potential disaster.

Disaster recovery is a defined process, policy, and procedure for restoring operations critical to the resumption of business to include: regaining access to data (records, hardware, software, etc.), communications (incoming, outgoing, toll-free, fax, etc.), workspace, and other business processes after a natural or human-induced disaster.

Developing a Plan

To increase the opportunity for a successful recovery of valuable records, a well-established and thoroughly tested disaster recovery plan must be developed.  The key question is whether to build it in-house or outsource it to a Disaster Recovery service provider.  The decision to build or buy is critical and is determined from the results of your business impact analysis.  

It is important to define the RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective); how much data can you afford to lose and how fast you need to be able to recover critical resources in the event of a disaster.  

Service providers should understand and fulfill the full range of a company’s critical service requirements: different operating platforms, communication services, integrated applications, etc.  Remember, it is not just replication of software or storage of data; service providers should have the capability to converge the entire infrastructure to an alternate site.

Precautionary Measures

In addition to preparing for the need to recover systems, organizations must also implement precautionary measures with an objective of preventing a disastrous situation in the first place. These may include some of the following:

• Local mirrors of systems and/or data and use of disk protection technology such as RAID
• Surge Protectors — to minimize the effect of power surges on delicate electronic equipment
• Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) and/or Backup Generator to keep systems going in the event of a power failure
• Fire Preventions — more alarms, accessible fire extinguishers
• Anti-virus software and other security measures

Performing a regular review and audit of your contingency and back-up arrangements is nothing short of due diligence.  It is essential to help ensure that you are able to withstand and recover from a major incident.

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