Back it up back it up, let me begin
Ollie Jackman
Co-Founder & Director at Agile Comms - straightforward business telecoms without the handcuffs
Only six percent of companies without a disaster recovery plan survive a disaster. Six percent!
So, what should a disaster recovery planning session look like?
Firstly, it’s worth knowing a little about the three types of disasters your organisation faces:
- System Disasters: The one IT Managers should be trying to mitigate by putting a robust infrastructure plan together. When a component of your IT systems fails, what is the impact?
- Natural Disasters: Acts of God etc. What if your server room were flooded or struck by lightning?
- Human Error Disasters: You won’t be surprised that these are the most common. Mostly these are unintentional, but sometimes malicious.
Secondly, take each role or service that your infrastructure (voice & data) is providing to your staff and consider the impact of downtime and disruption.
For example; Email. Can you survive without it? How long can the business withstand disruption?
You might like to use these simple guidelines to help establish some objectives for each of these roles:
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO): In the event of failure, how quickly does this particular service need to be recovered? i.e. what length of downtime can the business withstand?
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO): When having to recover, how far back in time is appropriate? An hour? A day? A month?
- Retention: How long must backups be kept? How should the archive retention be managed for each service?
It’s sometimes very difficult to pinpoint these specifically, but the exercise can result in a good set of guidelines which can help build a Disaster Recovery plan and associated business case for any required services.
Modern recovery systems should give a great deal of flexibility and reliability and you may decide to outsource the backup & disaster recovery processes to get the best from your partners. In my opinion, these services should be reviewed at least once a year to make sure your business is meeting the (no doubt) growing demand for uptime and getting best value.