A Disaster Recovery Plan - (pt.2)

Last time we discussed what a Disaster Recovery Plan should do for your business. Now we will attempt to cover what you should consider in creating your plan.

Your enterprise and your systems are intimately connected. There will have to be a compromise between effective disaster recovery procedures, and the costs involved.  Costs should be the second consideration to implementing an effective plan, since a disaster could ultimately be much more costly in the long run, in terms of lost business and lost employee time.

You must examine all areas of your network that will be affected by a network failure ... critical applications, computers, routers, switches, servers, specialized devices and storage.  How and why a network slowdown or failure could occur should be considered.  Power outages, local construction projects, acts of nature, and hackers bent on intrusion or vandalism are all examples of what a disaster recovery plan should address.  What kind of losses, if any, can your enterprise sustain?  Can you function without your systems for a few days?  Do you need all systems 100% operational every day - all day?  If something goes down, who do you call?  When do you call them?  Who is your business relying upon to put it all back together?

As I mentioned in the previous article, your Disaster Recovery Plan must be part of your routine IT operations.  Recovering from a network catastrophe should be as normal a procedure as performing backups or upgrading applications … no big deal.  Whenever there is an upgrade or an addition to equipment, the plan must also be amended as part of the upgrade procedure.  Management of the plan is part of the plan.