Is Your Disaster Recovery Plan Missing Any Of These Essential Components?

People prefer to focus on the positive, and that’s certainly true of executives tasked with growing a business. But sometimes we have to think about what we’re going to do if things don’t go according to plan. An unforeseen setback can damage the healthiest business. Disasters come in many guises, from a mistyped command to a hurricane, but no disaster has to become a catastrophe if a business is properly prepared — and that means having a plan.

A disaster recovery plan documents processes and procedures to be put into action when disaster strikes. It covers what is to be done and who is responsible. A comprehensive disaster recovery plan considers the entirety of a business’s operations, but I’d like to take a look at how a disaster recovery plan can help companies weather the storm when their IT infrastructure takes a hit.

Have A Plan

The most important part of disaster recovery is to have a plan. It may seem that this doesn’t need saying, but you’d be surprised how many businesses have no idea how they’d handle a serious incident.

The process of developing a disaster recovery plan for infrastructure starts with a thorough risk assessment. Develop an understanding of systemic risks within the business. What could happen if a key service provider falls victim to a DDoS attack? What might be the consequences of a hardware failure at your primary data center?

Once the risks are understood, consider how to reduce them. It’s important to identify any single point of failure and act to remove it. The best option is usually to introduce redundancy into the system: make sure you have infrastructure available at more than one location and that your business isn’t entirely dependent on the offering of any one vendor.

A disaster recovery plan should be a living document. It does no good at all to spend a couple of weeks developing a disaster recovery plan only to put it in a drawer for the next ten years. As the company and its infrastructure evolves, the disaster recovery plan must evolve with it.

Know Who Is Responsible For What

A disaster recovery plan is worthless if it’s not clear who is responsible for implementing it. Everyone involved should understand their role — who is expected to form an incident team, which members of staff will be part of the team, what are their individual responsibilities?

In addition to making the plan, training may be necessary to familiarize team members with their responsibilities. A minor hiccup can turn into a serious problem if everyone thinks dealing with it is someone else’s job.

Backup And Replication

No infrastructure is immune to disaster; redundancy is key, including redundant failover infrastructure and comprehensive up-to-date backups. If a key database server goes down, having a failover ready can mean the difference between a couple of hours of service disruption and days or weeks of recovery.

Steadfast offers multiple enterprise-grade backup options for companies building disaster recovery plans, including custom Veeam Backup and Replication and R1Soft Server Backup with continuous data protection.

Regular Testing

Disaster Recovery plans and backups are next to useless if they aren’t regularly verified and tested. As I said earlier, a disaster recovery plan should be a living document, and part of keeping it alive is testing to make sure each component works as expected. It’s all too common to have a backup silently fail, and to realize in the middle of a crisis that the cupboard is bare. Regular, comprehensive backup and redundant infrastructure testing can make a huge difference, and provides an opportunity to run through processes to make sure they work as expected.

Without a disaster recovery plan, a business is teetering on the edge of catastrophe, but with a well-tested, constantly maintained plan, even the most serious incidents don’t pose an existential risk to the business.