Hopefully your business will never have to experience a major disaster. But having an effective disaster recovery plan with sufficient documentation, adequate testing, and well trained staff will increase your chances of survival when faced with a minor or major catastrophe.
The Top Ten Most Forgotten Things When
Building a Disaster Recovery Plan
Every IT manager knows the importance of having an e?ective disaster recovery (DR) plan. Organizations without an adequate plan may ?nd themselves out of business quickly after experiencing a major disaster. This statistic is ampli?ed for small and midsized businesses: many of these businesses today are relying on archaic backup and restore plans that will certainly not enable them to survive many of the disasters seen lately or the frequency of everyday mishaps that impact IT.
Organizations that want to ensure survival following a disaster may already understand the basics of creating a good plan; however, there are many obstacles and pitfalls that they can easily avoid. Based on working with thousands of customers, we've come up with the following top ten checklist. Take a look to make sure you haven't missed a crucial step that could make the di?erence between staying open or going under!
Hopefully your business will never have to experience a major disaster. But having an e?ective disaster recovery plan with su?cient documentation, adequate testing, and well trained sta? will increase your chances of survival when faced with a minor or major catastrophe.
Interested in learning more about the positive impact VMware
virtualization can have on your businesses' survival?
Learn more by visiting www.vmware.com/smb.1. Failing to identify everything that could poten- 6. Failing to create adequate documentation of your tially jeopardize the infrastructure and data that DR plan. After creating a plan, be sure that you create run your business. In addition to the obvious threats detailed step-by-step instructions on how to execute - viruses, Trojans, worms, etc. - you need to identify any the recovery plan. Ensure that every process is well forces that are unique to your geography. Do you live documented. Describe the location of all system on an earthquake fault or in a ?ood zone? Does your resources needed to accomplish the recovery. Be sure region experience frequent power interruptions from to store the documentation at multiple locations and storms or rolling blackouts? Make sure all of these verify that all key personnel have easy access to the possibilities are considered when creating your plan or manuals.choosing a location for a new DR facility. 7. Relying on back ups. It doesn't matter how good your 2. Creating a plan that depends on too few quali?ed DR plan is if your data is out of date, is in a location also personnel. It is not uncommon for businesses to a?ected by the disaster, or has become corrupted. create a DR plan that depends on just one IT person Perform backups at rigidly enforced, regular intervals to with a pager. What if that person is unavailable for some protect information integrity. Or, use a technology like reason? You need to identify and cross-train a pool of VMware virtualization to implement a remote site with employees that are capable of responding in an replicated virtual machines to speed recovery.emergency. It also helps if this pool of resources is 8. Forgetting to test your disaster recovery plan. You geographically dispersed in case of a large environmen- need to make sure your recovery plan actually works in tal disaster that a?ects all local employees. an emergency! While this seems obvious, many 3. Relying on manual processes to notify sta? during enterprises neglect to adequately test their plans. You a disaster. If the power goes out in your facility and no should regularly conduct data ?re-drills to test every one is there to report it, will your DR sta? be informed? possible scenario, from basic power failures to You need to create an automated system that will notify catastrophic events that could result in multiple your IT sta? of any disaster or disruption to service. You months of devastation. Again, technology like VMware can also establish an arrangement with a third-party virtualization, and the ability to to provision any server service provider to monitor your facility and notify a with the virtual machines needed, in minutes, make pre-de?ned set of individuals that are trained to testing your DR plan fast and e?ective.execute your DR plan. 9. Making passwords too hard to ?nd. Though 4. Failing to procure adequate backup power. If your... [download for more]
