Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.
—Murphy’s Law
The cornerstone of Disaster Recovery is planning ahead and maintaining good documentation. Better to prepare for the worst than try to come up with a plan after the disaster has already struck.
Can your business operate without computers? Don’t be caught off-guard by fires, floods, or meteor strikes. Like insurance, a disaster recovery plan is something that you hope you’ll never need.
The goal of Disaster Recovery planning is to come up with a Business Continuity scenario in which business critical systems can recovery quickly and other systems can be addressed by triage in all manner of “disasters” — be they simple hardware device failures or catastrophic damage by fire, flood, earthquake or other hazards.
Disaster Recovery By Design
Resilience
By performing a Risk Assessment and Business Impact Assessment, we can identify weaknesses in infrastructure and introduce system resilience or redundancy to mitigate the effects of a “single point of failure” which tend to invite a “house of cards” effect. By building a strong foundation, when one system fails, another can step in to take the load. Virtualization and Cloud services in particular can greatly aid in both redundancy and rapid disaster recovery.
Recovery
A recovery plan is created to restore systems when designed resilience and redundancy fail. When the server has died, be confident that a backup is in place to restore from.
Contingency
The worst-case scenario. Your building is a smoking ruin. The on-site backups are melted to the floor along with the rest of the equipment in the server room and flooded by the firefighters for good measure. An off-site or cloud-based backup ensures your business will rise from the ashes.
Operating a business without a disaster recovery plan is like flying without a parachute. Don’t get caught without one.
