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!

Whatever the disruption, Gartner reports that 40% of small to midsize businesses that can’t get to their data within 24 hours after a crisis eventually close as a result. More specifically yet, the US National Fire Protection Agency found that 43% of companies never resume business after a fire.

Today, many regulatory and industry-mandated best practices require a written disaster recovery (DR) or business continuity (BC) plan. Even in industries unrestricted by regulations, disasters present competitors the opportunity to steal customers. That’s how something as simple as a disaster recovery plan can determine the success or failure of a business. If your organization hopes to survive an operation-halting event, you should have a working, tested, and current DR/BC plan.

It’s not as difficult as you might think—DR/BC involves surprisingly simple and inexpensive technologies. The technology components are well known, widely available, and reasonably priced. Options for small to midsize businesses include:

• Readily available, low-cost, disk-to-disk (D2D) systems and virtual tape libraries (VTL)
• Various cloud-based and managed-service options
• New communication options, such as cellular, Wi-Fi, Blackberry/smartphones, social networks, or shared online space

While the technology is simple, disaster recovery plans do require a suitable amount of preparation and maintenance to be successful. Disaster recovery plans work best when the technology is ready, tested, and up to date. These DR plans are enterprise-wide and include the full commitment and participation of senior management.

When an emergency hits, you need the right people, the right data, in the right places fast. That takes time and preparation.  Here is the first of six best practices to help you prepare and maintain an effective disaster recovery plan.

Your organization likely has hundreds of operations in its overall business—but it probably only requires a percentage of those operations to survive a disaster. For a fully developed, robust disaster recovery plan, you’ll want to make sure you get a thorough Business Impact Assessment (BIA).

A well-executed BIA will identify your company’s most critical business functions as they relate to your company’s survival after a crisis. It will identify recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) for each of your business processes— that is, it will identify which parts of your organization incidents are most likely to affect and how they will affect the company as a whole. You’ll use this information to prioritize your business processes and identify which you consider truly critical.

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.

Our next blog post will explore 2 more best practices for disaster recovery. As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas for best practices, so please comment.