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• Deduplication, backup and continuous data protection
• Disaster planning and operational recovery
• Mitigate risk to critical data

1. Getting a thorough business impact assessment (BIA)
2. Finding experienced DR/BC planners and project managers
3. Investing the appropriate resources, budget and time
4. Planning alternate lines of communication
5. Testing thoroughly and frequently

Here’s our last disaster recovery best practice…Keep Your Plans Accurate and Up to Date.

When you first create a disaster recovery plan, you’ll thoroughly document the steps and procedures. However, businesses change all the time and your disaster recovery plan must evolve with your organization. When people join or leave the company, when you add or remove systems—any time something changes, you should update the plan accordingly. In the event of a disaster, you need to know your plan doesn’t rely on an employee who left the company months ago.

Nearly every company in every industry has increased its dependency on computerized information systems, electronic data, and electronic commerce over recent years. While this technology may have dramatically improved business, it has also created a dangerous liability for companies unprotected by a disaster recovery plan.

Why risk it? Effective disaster recovery plans don’t require costly new equipment or technology. They just need sound planning around business needs, active support of top management, sufficient resources, and regular testing and updating.

Emergencies often disrupt the usual lines of communication— your phone systems may be down, your primary carrier may be out, or your cellular carriers could be swamped by traffic. Additionally, people may scatter during an emergency, so you need to plan how employees will communicate after a disaster.

Make sure you include alternative means of communication in your disaster recovery plan. If possible, try to offer multiple communication options. This step also includes gathering the appropriate phone numbers, web addresses, and contact information. Finally, make sure you communicate this information to everyone in your company.

Hopefully, you’ll never have to see your disaster recovery plans in action. You definitely don’t want to wait until a disaster to find out how well you planned, however. Test your disaster recovery plans in advance—thoroughly and often.

Generally, you should expect to test the entire plan at least once a year. If anything changes between these annual tests, you should revise the parts of the plan these changes might affect. Then be sure to test the complete plan before the regularly scheduled test.

Our final blog post on this subject will explore one last disaster recovery best practice – Keeping your plans accurate and up to date. Come back again soon!

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!