Listen to some marketing gurus and you’ll hear that human beings were never meant to sit at desks. Mobility is built into people, they claim. In that case, as technology is driving today’s businesses, it needs to move around with and adapt to people (and not vice versa). The mobile user experience should be the priority, and neither network connection nor smaller screen should interfere with productivity and effectiveness. That raises some interesting questions about the disaster recovery of such a mobile-oriented set-up.

If business software and data is being managed successfully from mobile computing devices, then so should disaster recovery for that software and data. There are several reasons why this should be so.

  • When all users are mobile, then mobile is the only way to communicate DR plans, alerts and instructions. As an environmentally friendly consequence, DR plans will no longer need to be printed out on paper and neither will updates to those plans.
  • Mobile disaster recovery operatives are autonomous, can be called and located geographically, and can continue to function even if central systems are down.
  • The cloud is increasingly the home for central systems, making mobile devices the only tangible IT for ever larger communities of users.

But if disaster recovery from your mobile device is a logical consequence, the app that helps you do your DR still needs to be well-designed. Functionality must be intuitive. Usability will need to be excellent, in high pressure situations as well as normal workdays.

This is the approach taken by an application like MIRA (Mobile Incident Response Application). DR plans are available anywhere, any time and updated dynamically according to the role of each individual. Team members can be deployed according to their location, and recovery status after an incident is monitored and available to each user. In short, when it is properly designed, DR from a mobile device in your pocket will feel so natural that you’ll wonder why on earth you ever bothered with PCs or printers in the first place.