Disaster Recovery Planning 10 Top Tips

We all know that IT downtime happens, whether due to cyber-attack, power-cut, natural disaster including hurricanes, fire, floods or even unplanned IT outages. Every company, whatever the size or number of locations should have a disaster recovery plan in place as part of the business continuity strategy. 

With the International Standard ISO 22301 introduced in May this year, it covers business continuity and disaster recovery requiring an organization to prove that they fully test developed contingency plans.  “ISO 22301:2012 specifies requirements to plan, establish, implement, operate, monitor, review, maintain and continually improve a documented management system to protect against, reduce the likelihood of occurrence, prepare for, respond to, and recover from disruptive incidents when they arise.” (source: http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail?csnumber=50038)

We have compiled together some helpful tips of how to ensure your plan works smoothly in the event of a disaster and need for bare machine recovery occurs.

Disaster Recovery Tips:

1. Test, test and test again, at least quarterly run through the disaster recovery process, ensure that it all works, re-create plan to include any changes that are highlighted through this testing process, this should streamline your process and make it user-friendly and robust
2. Staff knowledge, document processes and ensure that everyone involved understands the process required to recover and restore systems. Enabling staff from branches and individual offices to be in control of their requirements whether onsite or remotely can also provide your organization with better control over data and systems, providing a swifter solution to recovery
3. Different locations, keep your data in more than one place. Virtualization and Cloud are becoming increasingly popular to help keep data safe and stored in several secure locations
4. System Disks – have you got copies of all the system disks and the authorization codes that will need to be on-hand and re-installed, if you are not using a BMR solution that can do this automatically for you
5. Make sure backups are working correctly, without a backup of the system it doesn't matter what BMR software you have in place, data cannot be recovered if there is not a recovery point to recover from! If you backup to tape make sure that the tapes are replaced regularly to stop them from degrading 
6. Know and have to hand the support contact information, including several contact methods – phone, email and web support etc. to protect from disruptions in services, can you still contact your third-party support if the phone lines are down?
7. Critical systems prioritized, know which order to start up systems and servers. Have mission critical systems restored first; reduce business downtime to a minimum
8. Automate as much as possible, eliminate human error and interaction where possible and avoid simple mistakes
9. Security – don’t neglect it, just because you are pressured in a real-situation, ensure that you are not by-passing security measures to achieve Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) allow your RTOs to include these steps
10. Inventory all IT assets, knowing what you have got is essential, inventory of all your assets allows you to structure your priority systems and ensure that each sever has been recovered, cross them off as they are restored.

For further advice on BMR and data backup software, we would be happy to discuss your requirements whether for a single server or a data centre, we can offer a BMR solution to enable you to have a robust, reliable and speedy backup and recovery system in place.

Predictable recoveries in an unpredictable world – Cristie Software

sales@cristie.com
www.cristie.com