And it’s not as difficult as you might think. The technology components of disaster recovery planning are fairly well known, widely available, and reasonably priced. Some 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 relatively simple, disaster recovery planning does require some amount of preparation and maintenance to be successful. Disaster recovery planning works best when the technology is available, tested, and current. Disaster recovery planning does need to be enterprise-wide and include the full commitment and participation of senior management.

Here are six best practices when putting together your disaster recovery plan…

1. Get a thorough business impact assessment. Your company probably has tons of data and operations overall, but what do you really need to survive a disaster? A well thought-out business impact assessment or disaster recovery audit will identify those critical business functions, recovery point objectives, and recovery time objectives for each business process. It will also map your critical business processes to the IT systems that support them.

2. Find experienced disaster recovery planners and project managers. This is important stuff, so be sure that whoever is assigned to your disaster recovery plan has the experience and wherewithal to execute your plan. Do they know your systems and disaster recovery plan well? A smart disaster recovery planning consultant can really help you and your staff with the preparedness they’ll need.

3. Invest the appropriate resources, budget and time. A smart disaster recovery plan can make or break your business when crisis occurs, so don’t skimp. You need to invest accordingly and make sure that you disaster recovery plan evolves as your business evolves. It needs to stay current and that requires commitment.

4. Plan alternate lines of communication. How will you communicate after a disaster if the phone lines are down, cell phones don’t work, and your employees scatter? Gather all employee contact information and make sure people know where this is. Plan for a number of different communication scenarios.

5. Test thoroughly and frequently. Remember all those fire drills in school as a kid? The same goes here. Test your plan at least once a year. This will help you identify parts of your disaster recovery plan that need updating.

6. Keep you plans accurate and up to date. Your business is changing, evolving, and growing. Accompanying that change, your company needs to update the disaster recovery plan. You don’t want your planning to rely on an employee that left the company 4 months ago.

Whether we like it or not, most companies rely on technology and this dependence is likely to increase. Protect yourself and your organization by creating a disaster recovery plan and updating it frequently.

Reduce costs. Saving money permeates throughout all of the benefits listed here, but certainly with respect to capital equipment investments virtualization technology can seriously reduce IT budgets. Virtual servers run at up to 80 percent utilization versus non-virtualized servers which only run between 5 and 15 percent. With this increase in efficiency you can consolidate the number of servers required.

Reduce downtime. Virtual servers provide a more efficient means of backup thus improving disaster recovery planning. They can be replicated and spun-up faster as well, which means that any downtime is minimized. Given the costs associated with extended downtimes, the improvement in business continuity provided by virtual servers also reduces costs.

Improved efficiency. With fewer servers in your data center, virtualization technology provides for better space management. The subsequent drop in power consumption improves efficiency and saves money.

Faster server deployment. Because virtual servers can be standardized, they can be easily replicated, allowing you to deploy them faster. This results in a more efficient and nimble IT department – depending on your business, this can potentially translate into greater speed to market.

Virtual servers and virtualization technology are options you may want to consider for your data center. If you’re not sure if it’s right for your organization, there are many resources out there – or you can contact us. We’ll be happy help!

ASG has customers who use cloud-based disaster recovery strategies as a tertiary datacenter. Those customers generally have no need to consider the same level of questions as customers considering the cloud for their sole disaster recovery solution.

But for customers who are considering the cloud for their sole DR strategy—they’ll have just as many contractual questions as infrastructure/technical questions. For example, what about commercial apps in cloud? Most apps don’t get restarted automatically, so they’ll need to consider what will happen if the cloud goes offline. Licensing issues should also be a concern. When do customers pay?  In advance and/or for what length of term?

There are lots of questions to ask before moving to the cloud, especially with disaster recovery in mind. Cloud computing solutions providers are not responsible for backing anything up. Performance guarantees? Nope, only availability. Either way, you’re going to need new tools to monitor, manage and deploy cloud-based apps.

Here’s an idea of where your list of questions might start (we’ve looked at many of these questions before in our 30 questions to ask before turning to the cloud post…

• What happens when the cloud goes offline? How will you get notified? Are services restarted automatically?
• If you want to terminate a contract before the term ends, what kinds of “lock-in” or “must pay” clauses exist?
• Can you only terminate the contract “for cause?” And if so, how difficult is it to prove a cause?
• How much does it cost to customize your apps once they’re in the cloud?
• How does your cloud provider supply QoS to your business?
• Do they provide load balancing or availability guarantees?
• How much does it cost to import your data? How much will it cost to export your data?
• How must does it cost to back up your data once it’s in the cloud?
• What are your expected RPO and RTO from your cloud provider?
• What are the cloud computing solutions providers’ annual revenues? How long has it been in business? How many customers?
• Is your cloud computing solutions provider providing you with SLAs that are currently better than what you have today?
• How will you transfer the software licenses you currently own?
• Will your apps be clustered in the cloud?
• How will you manage your apps for performance and/or outages?
• Will your cloud computing solutions provider use an underlying Iaas for their own infrastructure? Or will they build their own infrastructure?
• What is the SLA? What happens if your cloud provider doesn’t meet it?
• Do they have a disaster recovery plan? If so, can they send you a copy?
• Can they provide documentation of their uptime for this year and last year?
• How do they communicate problems, outages, and fixes to their customers?
• How does your cloud provider implement backups, and how long do they keep your data?
• Who has access to your data and/or the hardware on which it is running?
• How is redundancy implemented within your environment? Do you have spare disk drives, servers, power supplies, internet circuits?
• Do you have full ownership of my data?
• Does your cloud provider offer a standard annual termination for convenience?
• Do they allow for annual usage-level alignment (up or down) based on your business needs?
• Can you apply monthly rollover usage to address seasonal peaks?
• Can they provide long-term price protection?

How is your organization currently handling disaster recovery? Are you considering the cloud? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

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.