You know that you need to regularly and realistically test your disaster recovery plan. Without this testing, you’ll never know if the plan works – at least not until a disaster actually occurs, by which time it may be too late. Read more
Your disaster recovery plan and your backup solutions may be impressive, but a disaster is still a disaster. Whether the outage was short or long, whether data losses were negligible or considerable, somebody somewhere will have noticed – and will be waiting for an explanation. Your stakeholders in the matter may be your manager, internal users, external customers or anybody else to whom you gave assurances of IT system levels of service. As with other crises in corporate life, there is a right and a wrong way to handle communications afterwards. Here are five mistakes that are best avoided. Read more
A good disaster recovery plan is at the same time an asset and a liability. It’s an asset because you’ve thought about the risks and the requirements for recovery after any IT-related incident likely to affect your organisation. Yet it’s also a liability, because if it remains exactly as it is, sooner or later it will become out of date. A DR plan should always reflect the business needs of the organisation. As these needs change, the DR plan should be updated accordingly. On the other hand, advances in DR best practices and technology may also prompt changes, for example to improve RTO or RPO, lower ongoing costs, or even both. There is clearly a need to both drive and be driven. Read more
It’s that time of the year again! How time flies when you’re having fun. It seems like only yesterday that you were making your disaster recovery resolutions for 2015. Now here you are, 12 months down the line, with (hopefully) a great disaster recovery plan already in place. So far so good, but remember that a plan can go stale quickly. Regular attention to your DR planning and management is a more effective way to stay sharp and ready to handle any incident. The challenge is to keep it relevant, comprehensive and cost-effective. Here are our hints for 2016 to help you do that. Read more
Is the cloud the answer to your backup problems? Will it automatically let you put your disaster recovery plan into action in the blink of an eye and get your systems running again after a crash?” Despite the reputation the cloud has acquired for keeping your data safe, there is more to robust, effective backup than simply copying your files over to a remote server in somebody else’s secure data centre. For users who have been conscientiously using the cloud to mirror their data processing on local servers and PCs, the following may come as something of a shock. Read more
The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Although you may have planned for individual components of data recovery after an incident, the overall impact must also be assessed. An example is the need to recover operations that have been successfully transferred to a disaster recovery backup site, in order to have them running once again on the primary site. In some cases, this final step can be even more complicated than the initial move out to the secondary site. Or you may have forgotten to include computing systems that live outside the perimeter of ‘official’ enterprise backup. A combined top-down and bottom-up approach can help to cover all the bases. Read more
Do you have a written disaster recovery plan for your organisation? Putting disaster recovery procedures on paper or into a file to read on your computer or smartphone is a key part of good disaster recovery planning. But just by itself, it’s not a guarantee of DR success. For one thing, the outside world moves on whereas your plan does not (unless you make the effort to revise it). But adjusting for the reality of a changing environment is just one way that your disaster recovery plan needs to be kept real. Read more
The biggest problem with a disaster recovery plan is when there isn’t one. If nothing has been prepared, planned or backed-up, then that’s what you can expect to salvage in the case of a serious incident – nothing. But even when the plan exists, too many organisations leave gaping holes. If you’re starting in a new position as disaster recovery manager, you have the advantage of bringing a fresh pair of eyes and seeing things that your colleagues have missed or dismissed as unimportant. Here’s a checklist to help you spot what might need to be fixed, and underlying causes of the problems. Read more
Sometimes it’s difficult to see the forest for the trees. Disaster recovery plans can rapidly grow in complexity, as organisations get larger and IT systems more intricate. The use of templates can sometimes help DR planners to focus on essentials, but even templates don’t always do the trick. As with many challenges, the way forward may be to break the problem down into component parts or to initially simplify it and build in any additional, necessary complexity afterwards. For example, larger entities might start with a small business approach to ensure that each department or business unit at least has the following items under control. Read more
As you progressed in your early education from the basics like learning your alphabet and simple arithmetic, and onwards with subjects like history, geography, maths and the sciences, you may well have been told to read around your subject. Good teachers know that “the map is not the territory” and that if you really want to get the most out of a subject, reading a variety of different texts and articles on that subject is a step forward in expanding your understanding. It lets you gain insights and make connections that might otherwise have eluded you. At disaster recovery plan level however, there’s a further recommended step. Read more