Disaster Recovery

Keys to a Success Disaster Recover Plan

It has been our experience that the keys to a successful Disaster Recovery (DR) plan are four-fold.  

First a company must understand what IT systems are necessary to perform what business operations. 

Second by outlining what business operations are critical, secondary and finally nice to have you get a feeling for how these systems need to be recovered. 

Third the firm must review the Business processes and IT systems to insure that all underlying or interfacing systems are accounted for. 

Finally a successful Disaster Recovery plan is periodically tested and the results of that test are fairly analyzed.  Based on those results the plan must be altered.  No plan is ever 100% right, especially not the first time through.  Realize that such plans will need to change over time as systems are replaced, companies are bought and sold, etc.  The needs of the company will change over time so be prepared to roll up your sleeves and dig in. 

We at Zombie Data have been doing this type of analysis, planning and testing for many years.  We believe in working with your business and your IT Department to either creating an initial DR Plan or an objective review of your current DR Plan.  By working thru the four keys outlined above your firm should be able to segment your business operations and supporting systems into 3 or 4 classifications.  An example of this could be Class A - 24x7 systems - must recover immediately, Class B - Critical Business Operations - 2 to 4 hour recovery, Class C - Important Systems - 24-48 hours recovery window, Class D - Ancilary systems - Greater than 72 hours recovery window. For an existing plan there were probably valid reasons why certain decisions were made at the time.  Our goal is to create a cyclical improvement process and learn from each iteration.

High Availability vs. Disaster Recovery

If you have been in IT for any length of time you may have heard of Five 9s of uptime.  This speaks more towards High Availability than Disaster Recovery. This is a seperate discussion that we can certainly drive but the two items are sometimes confused as one topic and that is just not the case.