Article: Disaster recovery plans beat good intentions

The best of intentions and planning can't prevent disasters. But you can greatly mitigate the risk of natural or human-induced disasters, and a significant part of that risk management involves implementing a business continuity plan, which should be intimately connected to your disaster recovery plan.

Ultimately, a disaster recovery plan should address these four key concerns: data integrity (the ability to save data); systems recovery (the ability to access and use data); work force protection (keeping it intact and able to function); and connectivity.

Growing threats
In the past, businesses may have given disaster recovery plans limited attention, but the urgency of establishing a plan has intensified in recent years as regulatory requirements have increased in response to growing threats of business interruption.

Cloud computing is among the tools gaining attention in disaster recovery. Indeed, a survey released late last month by the U.S. based Neverfail Group found 44% of respondents see the cloud as a viable option for disaster recovery, while 30% do not see it as such. The majority of those who did not see the cloud as viable said it was due to concerns about security, however 72% of respondents were "running mission critical options on virtual machines."

Only 5% report no outages
The Neverfail survey turned up some other intriguing data regarding disaster recovery and attitudes towards it. For example:

• 23% cent reported they had experienced an IT outage for more than one full business day; only 5% said they had never experienced an outage.
• 43% reported hardware or software problems caused most IT outages, 35% said power or data centres caused outages, natural disasters were responsible for 8%, human error caused 6%, and 8% were attributed to "other."
• 54% of respondents did not know their hourly cost of downtime.

These figures reflect just a small portion of the data that illustrate the importance of a disaster recovery plan, predicated on a business continuity program.

Key steps
To address the four key concerns outlined above, there are a number of steps you can take to establish a disaster recovery plan. Let's consider some key ones:

• Determine what is essential to keep the business running, including applications and data backup.
• Establish communications chains to declare a disaster and to notify employees and customers.
• Monitor and test disaster recovery plan components regularly.
• Establish server redundancy for all crucial data and put in place alternate means to access that data. These servers should be at a secure, off-site location.
• Establish off-site storage and data back-up and set a "recovery point objective" (RPO) – the acceptable time between the last accessible back-up and a disruption – based on tolerance for data loss.
• Back-up employees' laptops and desktops.
• Invest in theft recovery and data delete solutions for laptops. Theft recovery solutions locate, recover and return lost or stolen computers, while data delete options allow remote data deletion.
• Safeguard data and systems with regular virus protection updates.

Naturally, a more comprehensive effort is required to establish a disaster recovery plan; these steps can be considered a starting point. To implement a thorough plan, it can be helpful to engage a partner such as Allstream, with a national network that delivers the highest levels of data security.

Ultimately, the goal must be to protect your organization's reputation, avoid losing sales and revenue because of a shutdown, and build confidence among customers, employees and partners.