Don’t Improvise Your Way Through Disaster Recovery

Given the importance of disaster recovery (DR), you don’t want to improvise through the planning—or worse, through the execution. Here are some best practices to make sure your disaster recovery follows an effective script:

1. Assign staff to disaster recovery

It sounds obvious, but if you don’t have staff assigned to disaster recovery, it isn’t anybody’s job, and it won’t get done. You need staff who are dedicated and empowered to make sure disaster recovery is properly planned. This isn’t limited to technology staff either; business employees have roles and responsibility in disaster recovery as well.

2. Develop a detailed plan

If you don’t want to improvise, you need a documented plan. The full contents of a DR plan are beyond the scope of this short blog post, but you need to start by identifying all of your IT resources. Evaluate the impact of an outage on each application and use that to determine your DR priorities. Then assess how much time you can tolerate the application being down and how much data you can afford to lose. Use those numbers to guide you in developing a cost-effective recovery strategy. Document the recovery steps in detail, and make sure the recovery plan will be available in case of a disaster.

3. Test your recovery plan

It’s far better to discover your DR plan won’t work during a test rather than during a disaster. Schedule time to test your plan, at least annually. There are different ways of approaching testing, ranging from a table read-through of the documentation to fully executing the steps to failover and resume operations at a secondary site. The more your test simulates a real disaster, the more reliable results you’ll get. Track the time it takes to recover as well as the accuracy of the documented procedures. After the test, collect feedback from all participants on what worked and what didn’t, and use it to update the document.

4. Update the plan

Changes in your business and your technology mean the plan that worked last year may not work this year. Allocate time to review and update your plan every year—even better, make updating the plan part of your change management process and don’t sign off on deployments until the recovery process is documented.

5. Don’t go it alone

For many businesses, leveraging Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is a good choice that makes disaster recovery faster and more reliable. With DRaaS, you get a high level of automation and support from the provider to help guide you through the process of defining and implementing a recovery strategy.

Another way to avoid going it alone is to work with an IT services firm like CCS Technology Group. Our disaster recovery and business continuity services help you protect your data, reduce downtime, and survive a crisis. Contact us to learn how CCS Technology Group can help you write your disaster recovery script.