When Disaster Recovery Goes Wrong: Five Mistakes Your Business Should Avoid

Disaster recovery was once the preserve of corporations that could afford to run redundant infrastructure in several data centers. Today, cloud backup systems and virtualization allow smaller businesses to build robust disaster recovery systems, while larger businesses benefit from considerable cost savings.

In addition to getting cheaper, deploying a robust disaster recovery solution has never been easier. Steadfast’s cloud backup and DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) is designed to be simple to use, reliable, and comprehensive.

But if you make these mistakes, your disaster recovery plan may let you down when you need it the most.

Do We Really Need That?

One of the most common disaster recovery planning mistakes is neglecting important infrastructure and essential applications. For example, some businesses backup their database, but do nothing with the application servers that depend on it.

Avoiding a single point of failure is a key principle of disaster recovery. That requires a thorough audit of a business’s operations and the infrastructure and applications they rely on.

But It Worked Last Year!

Last year, we wrote about a major outage at GitLab. Engineers accidentally deleted a chunk of production data, and when they tried to restore from a backup, they found there was no backup. A version mismatch had caused the database backups to fail silently.

Regular testing is essential, which is why Steadfast’s DRaaS service includes annual testing of client DR environments.

Change Is A Constant

As businesses grow and change, there is a natural turnover of hardware and software. New servers and applications are deployed, old ones are retired. It is vital that disaster recovery planning takes account of these changes. As your business evolves, its disaster recovery solution must evolve too.

I Don’t Know What To Do!

Anyone who has worked in the IT field for a few years can tell you stories about easily avoided disasters caused by a lack of training and documentation. Your IT systems are built for your business, with modifications, tweaks, scripts, and other peculiarities designed to serve its operations. Without documentation, employees are prone to making assumptions that cause further damage or limit recovery times.

Does your team know what to do in a data loss incident or hardware failure? Do they know who to call? Are there designated managers and staff who can respond to incidents, and do they have the information they need?

(Not) In A Data Center Far, Far Away

One of the worst disaster recovery mistakes is to rely on nearby (or even the same) infrastructure for both primary operations and redundancy.

It is useful to have local backups stored on a nearby server, but if the network to the rack that houses both servers goes down, the backups will be out of reach too. It would be unfortunate if disaster recovery VMs were housed in the same data center as a company’s primary servers when the data center suffers a power outage.

The solution is secure offsite cloud backup and disaster recovery infrastructure located in a data center some distance from the primary.

To learn how Steadfast’s cloud Disaster Recovery as a Service platform can help your business avoid these mistakes, get in touch today.