The unexpected happens. Are you prepared? Do you have your business disaster recovery plan readied? See the article to find out the what’s, why’s, and the how’s of building your DR plan.
WHAT IS BUSINESS DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN?
It is a document that reflects your measures of recovery from a disastrous event. Includes defined strategies to help you and your employees prepare for a disaster. This encourages business continuity after the catastrophe.
Though business operations may be disrupted. But having a plan helps you build resilience. The goal is to get back to business as soon as possible.
WHY DEVELOP A BUSINESS DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN?
It either means the survival or bankruptcy of your business. However, your top priority should be the safety of your employees. After securing that, the implementation of your disaster recovery plan should be the next order of your business.
Any disaster or catastrophe can happen at any time. Thus, planning ahead gives you a foot forward.
5 TIPS HOW TO START
IDENTIFY THE KEY PERSONS
Immediately reach out to technical personnel in the event of the disaster. The sooner the better. This shall allow them to respond quickly. This aids the business to get back sooner. Moreover, take note that disasters do not always take place during office hours. Thus, keeping copies of information off-site should be ensured.
IDENTIFY CRITICAL SYSTEMS AND APPLICATIONS
Prioritize to create disaster recovery plans for the critical systems. Identify them first. Next, break them into components. How much is their likelihood of failure? How much impact would they entail to the business? As a result, the analysis of these components helps you to determine the criticality of the overall system.
MEASURE FOR ACHIEVABLE AND REALISTIC RTO AND RPO
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO)- the amount of time you need to bring your system back online
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO)- is the calculation for acceptable data loss from downtime
Improving these metrics and adjusting them accordingly will help you employ your plan. However, also make sure that they are reasonable. It should be achievable and realistic.
ANALYZE INTER-DEPENDENCIES
While creating the plan, you should also take a closer look between the systems interconnecting. Do inter-dependencies exist? If so, how do they rely on each other? How do they affect other systems and applications?
It is important to create flexible designs in the face of an outage, for instance. When doing so, look for single points of failure. Address them by finding solutions.
REDUNDANCY PLAN
The planning stage is the best time to look for redundancy. Can you do something to make the systems less prone to failure? See the possibilities if just one server in the process flow is available. It could be the web, integration, database, or another server. What would happen to your applications?
Planning for redundancy shall prepare you if you lose one server. You should have enough redundancy built-in. Thus, will serve as an edge in preventing an outage, for instance.
