Steps to Developing Disaster Recovery Preparedness

Are you all set to deal with your biggest challenge?

Implementing disaster recovery solution is like buying insurance policy. You keep it as a security against damage. Disaster recovery solutions work similarly: A service that enables you to secure your mission-critical digital assets at a data center(s) and retrieve it in the advent of disaster, thus minimizing business damage. But it doesn't stop till deploying DR solution, you must exercise your DR plans regularly.

Although many enterprises claim that they carry on a complete DR exercise, reports say that most of these exercises are not comprehensive enough as they simply develop a small part of the entire plan or subset of applications. Here are some best practices to DR preparedness for your data.

• Start Small :The first step here is to take inventory of all systems and application. Engage with different departments to determine your business priorities. Check what areas require more attention and what can be compromised for time-being.
• Determine RPO and RTO :Recovery Point Objective (RPO) outlines the amount of data that is tolerable to be risk during a disaster while Recovery Time Objective (RPO) is the duration of time within which the lost data can be recovered after a disaster. This means that if your business can stay without servers and technology for a longer time, you won't have to suffer much. But in case of an ecommerce platform or other online business, you can't afford to go offline even for 2 seconds.
• Redefine staff responsibilities :Disaster plan should clearly define tasks, responsibilities and team involved during a disaster occurrence. This will enable the parties to act wisely and in real-time at the event of disaster. Among these responsibilities should be the crucial task which is the decision to declare a disaster. However, when you exercise the plan, it's essential that the individual who developed the DR plan is not the same one to execute it, as it is less likely that the person would be available when a real disaster strike. By switching the responsibilities during DR development, you tend to train your staff in different key areas.
• Test, Revise, Re-test :Testing the plan frequently is of no harm. The more you test your DR plan, the better it would be. Check if your DR plan meets your objective by running your DR process, which will look for flaws and notify if any. If things don't work out as you wanted it to, better make revisions to it. After that, re-test and revise again and keep making the modification until you get what exactly you were looking for.

Additional Tips

• Power Redundancy is Key :Organizations running an in-house data center must also invest in its maintenance because the infrastructure is prone to potential outage caused by bad climate conditions, physical damage, etc. However, there's also another key aspect which is if data centers add an extra layer of power protection, it will directly lead to increase in IT overhead.
• Connectivity failure causes more downtime :Not all data centers are created equal and this rightly fits when it comes to delivering optimum network connection. Organizations managing network connectivity in-house to power mission-critical applications are highly subjected to downtime issues given loss of connectivity. It would be highly expensive to design the same level of redundancy offered by commercial data center service providers and thus, many organization fail to upkeep the required level of efficiency. Due to this, organizations tend to use one Internet carrier that creates a single point of failure.
• Lack of DR knowledge is equal to disaster :A staff without sufficient knowledge on disaster recovery is equal to disaster because it might complicate the situation. IT operators need to ensure that their staff has the required skill set essential for mitigating outage risk factors. If you experience that the workload on your IT staff is growing, then this may have a detrimental impact on the availability of your systems.