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A short checklist for Disaster Recovery
Given the recent tragedies in New York and Washington D.C., many companies that had placed little emphasis on disaster recovery measures are now rethinking their emergency plans.
- When reviewing disaster recovery plans, the first step is to determine the
financial impact of data downtime. How long can your business remain afloat
without your critical data? This information will affect your decisions
concerning the sophistication and capabilities of your disaster recovery
solution. Governmental regulations should also be considered at this stage.
Some organizations, such as financial institutions, face strong regulation by
the federal government and these regulations will need to be considered when
putting together a disaster recovery plan.
- After giving due
consideration to your business objectives, the next step is to identify the
segment of your data that is truly mission-critical. This information will
include both data and applications that must be accessible for your
organization to resume business. This information will vary from industry to
industry and business to business. The important point is to ensure that you
have all of the information your organization needs to resume business. For
example, depending on the timing of your data disaster, you may need to access
your payroll information within days, perhaps hours, of your initial data
loss. Those organizations that fail to protect this data may risk alienating
their employees at a time when their skills are most needed.
- After identifying the possible impact of a data loss disaster and discerning the segment of your data that is mission-critical, the next step is to review your current disaster recovery plan. Like any reaction-driven plan, your data recovery plan should be reviewed periodically. Is your plan still up to date with your technology? Often, data recovery plans are left unaltered as the rest of the IT infrastructure swells to meet the demands of a growing business. It is important to remember to review your plan whenever you augment your network or storage capabilities.
- Once you have looked at the first three steps in the checklist, you should decide if your internal IT staff is capable of updating your disaster recovery capabilities, or if the project should be handed off to an expert in the field of disaster recovery and business continuity. If you decide to outsource your disaster recovery solution, you should look for a company that is well versed in storage networking, because they will have a keen appreciation for the need for interoperability between various brands of servers, storage arrays, and networking equipment. Look for a vendor that is willing to recommend third party solution partners to ensure that your disaster recovery solution is made up of best-of-breed technologies.
Developing a Disaster Recovery Plan
There are several data recovery tools available that can be used to form a comprehensive, yet cost-sensitive disaster recovery plan. When deciding which technologies to use, it is helpful to use the concept of a data pyramid. In a data pyramid, your most important, business critical data forms the tip. This is data that must be protected at all costs, and some organizations will use a dedicated interconnected hot site strategy to maintain full availability. The next step down on the data pyramid is remote disc mirroring, followed by disc mirroring, shared disc backup, disc consolidation backup, and tape backup.
One of the keys to developing a disaster recovery plan is recognizing what data you can and cannot reasonably afford to be without-and for how long. Once this determination is made, experts from the disaster recovery field can assist in the design of a data recovery infrastructure for your organization.
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