Backups are vital for the smooth survival of your business or organisation. Another thing that goes hand in hand is Disaster Recovery (DR). Simply put this means how quickly can my business be back up and running after a Server or PC crashes.
It is all well and good having your data backuped up but to use this data you need your server or PC to be in exactly the state it was before the disaster struck.
Disaster recovery plan objectives
The key objective of a disaster recovery plan is to detail the key activities required to reinstate the critical IT services within the agreed recovery objectives. The most effective start point for any DR plan is the ‘declaration of a disaster’ once an incident has been deemed serious enough that ‘forward fixing’ at the primary location is impractical or is likely to result in an outage expending beyond the maximum tolerable outage.
There are a number of common mistakes which organisations make when creating a disaster recovery plan, these relate to the level of detail they contain and the ‘standalone’ nature of their construction.
What level of detail should the plan contain?
The answer will depend on who you ask, the more people you ask the varied number of replies you will receive. It is advisable to keep the IT DR plan as concise as possible and focus only on the key information required at the time of a disaster.
What information should the disaster recovery plan contain?
Why focus on consequences rather than the cause?
It is really important why the data centre is destroyed?
The only relevant question is what is the impact and can I realistically continue to host services from my primary site or should I invoke and recover/resume the critical services at my secondary site.
For more information please contact me – E-Mail: info@brendanmoran.ie
