Disaster Recovery
Most businesses are now dependent to some extent on Information Technology, whether it is a phone, laptop, cloud – private, public or hybrid – or a large footprint data center. The loss if this function for any reason can be pretty catastrophic for a business, even the loss of a single device can have a serious impact.
At its simplest, what is commonly referred to as a Disaster Recovery Plan is really a Business Continuity Plan for the IT department. It is just a piece of the overall plan, an important piece, but just another piece.
A good guide to the importance of your IT is the fact that within a few days of having a piece if equipment being used, the value of the data exceeds the value of the hardware. If you have equipment in use, being able to recover the contents quickly is important.
Disaster Recovery should be an integral part of your business continuity plan, it could be as simple as a USB stick on a key ring, recovering a cloud backup or it could involve failing over to another data center.
In the small to medium enterprise disaster recovery is often overlooked, the reason is simple – there is just too much other stuff to do. This is just a simple fact of life, the IT resource required to create and test a DR Plan can be more than is available.
Finding the time and resource to test a disaster recovery plan is a problem in most environments, but it is important that it is done – without testing the recovery you can only guarantee that the disaster will work – not a situation that you want to be in.
When writing a disaster recovery plan, specialist documentation should where possible be done as part of or an annex to the business continuity plan, this is a specialist function your IT staff are the best people to use. They understand the Infrastructure, the systems and the applications – but most importantly they understand better than most the importance to the business.
What should be in your plan, that will be decided by the risks and other information identified in your initial risk analysis. This defines the plan and its content, but remember the plan should be kept as simple as is practical and be tested and updated as often as required.
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