The survey currently
being undertaken by the newly formed Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council brings
up a point of best practice that IT professionals around the world have been
hammering into the business mind-set for some time.
In short, any company that ‘doesn’t
need’ a Disaster Recovery procedure for recovering systems and servers must
exist in a parallel dimension. As has been pointed out by the DRPC and many others,
human error is the primary culprit for system failure, and we do not yet live
in a world where human interaction is unnecessary. So it’s fair to say that if
you still employ human beings on your staff, you will need a DR plan.
But at the rate business data is expanding, any DR plan for ensuring its
recovery will need updating three or more times a year, and where do you find
the time? Manually going through every point-of-time backup for even a small
business is a mountain which you could only wish was a molehill.
The upshot of this is that even in the face of alarming statistics on
human error, only tier 1 system backups truly get the attention they need.
Production systems in tier 2-3 will get left out, despite the fact that these
systems are the ones running the branch office, point of sale and production
environments.
So balancing hours, or even days of lost production because of
one suspect backup; against the cost of automating your DR testing procedures,
tips only one way.
