Disasters are never expected, so being prepared is the best advice available. In our last blog post, we discussed the first disaster recovery best practice – Getting a Thorough Business Impact Assessment (BIA). This next blog in the series discusses two more disaster recovery best practices.
Because managers often underestimate the likelihood of disasters or business disruptions hitting their business, they typically assign the newest or least valuable people to DR/BC planning. However, effective planning requires the ability to anticipate what can go wrong and what you need to recover. Like many things, people best acquire this ability through experience—the more, the better.
Staff your team with seasoned veterans who know the business and who have been through disasters and disruptions before. If you don’t have experienced people, you can bring in professional consultants to guide you through the process. Highly trained consultants can help you identify your critical systems and create detailed plans to recover them to their current states. They can also assist in network, system, device, storage, and application discovery as well as identify the correct versions of firmware and software.
Finally, the BIA will map the business-critical processes to the underlying IT systems that support them. Then your disaster recovery planning team will use the results of the BIA to design disaster recovery strategies for these processes.
When something as basic as a disaster recovery plan can determine the success or failure of a business, cutting corners is costly. And unfortunately, disaster recovery isn’t a one-time exercise and expense. Your business changes constantly and you should update your disaster recovery plan as needed. That means you can expect to budget DR/BC planning costs annually. In addition to costs, make sure you offer sufficient support to your DR/BC team so they can dedicate the necessary time and effort to create and maintain a robust disaster recovery plan.
In our next blog in the series we’ll explore two more disaster recovery best practices. Please leave comments on your disaster recovery stories or best practices. We’d love to hear from you!
