Disaster recovery (DR) is not about recovering from a disaster, but planning for one, because business continuity is crucial to your organisation. DR involves up-to-date technology and well-informed IT staff (in-house or out-sourced) who will implement the phases of your disaster recovery plan. Your business must be up and running at all times. This is crucial for both SMBs and Corporate Enterprises as a disaster could easily damage your credibility.

Disaster recovery (DR) plans and strategies run from relatively simple to complex and all encompassing, depending on the requirements and the foreseen threats.

Here are some things to consider when creating a DR plan:

·              What could happen and what is most likely to happen, and how will it affect your business? For example, if email is an essential part of your business, then it needs to have a DR focus. Could you revert to manual processes (e.g. telephone, fax) for some period of time, and if so, for how long and at what expense to your business? Identify what needs to be protected along with what is required in order to restart, restore and recover your business applications and data.

·              Consider scenarios where your facilities, servers, storage or applications are still intact, however you have no access to them because of a network failure.
For example, an event such as a power failure or an accident on an adjacent roadway or site prevents network access to applications and data in another physical location.

·              Your plan should also consider damaged or failed individual servers and PCs in your network as well as loss or destruction of storage systems and other IT resources.
For example, in the wake of a major catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina, some secondary or remote storage systems used for remote mirroring, replication or electronic vaulting were also damaged in addition to primary systems.

·               Simply relying on a data recovery services alone is not a fail-safe strategy for data protection. Instead, you should combine recovery services with other techniques, including regular data backups with copies sent off site, either via network-based remote backups or removable media. If you have multiple branch locations, you should set up your servers to replicate or copy critical files and applications between sites on a regular basis.

·              Often the focus of DR involves hot or cold standby locations with real-time data mirroring and replication, or remote backup to an off-site facility. For some environments, disaster recovery plans should include a pre-established relationship with a data recovery service. Data recovery services are useful for recovering accidentally deleted files or damaged media and disks, thus avoiding costly and timely reconstruction of entire systems or disks. But a recovery service should always be used in parallel with, not separate from, other recovery efforts as a further insurance policy.

·              As a best practice, design and configure your disaster recovery plan to contain and isolate faults and prevent them from spreading throughout your network. To do this, eliminate single points of failure by duplicating network nodes and routes, and combine various data protection techniques to achieve resiliency.