Disaster Recovery Planning | How prepared are you?

Backup Solutions and Disaster Recovery Planning are normally bunched together by most businesses and put on the “to do list”. They normally stay there and only ever get looked at when there is nothing else to do or they get considered right after some sort of disaster has occurred.

What is a realistic disaster?

We could scare monger and tell you how your IT systems are going to come to an end immediately unless you backup. We could tell how the biggest threat to your computer data is a fifteen year old hacker with nothing better to do on a Friday night. However this would all be wrong.

The realistic threats to your IT systems are computer hardware failure, computer virus infection, theft and damage due to fire or flooding.

Firstly you should have a simply and effective backup solution that is both on-site and off-site. As this article is about disaster recovery planning, we aren't going to detail backup solutions specifically, but if you are interested, please click here to read more about backup solutions.

What happens when things have gone wrong?

You've come into work on Monday morning to find your main server (or computer) won't start up. You've called in the experts and they have diagnosed that the computer has had a hardware failure that isn't easily recoverable. They might even be able to fix it, but it's going to take days for the required parts to arrive.

So what next........

“It's ok we have a disaster recovery plan, that those nice gentlemen over at Lucid Computer Solutions put together for us!”

Thankfully this particular business has a detailed document which contains the detailed information that will get the business up and running.

What does the disaster recovery plan contain?

Each disaster recovery plan will be customised specifically for that business, but in summary, it will contain:

• The backup solution | Where to find it and how to restore the data, emails, databases, accounts etc

• The hardware | Which computer will become the temporary server?

• The software | Location and details of licenses, media, keys and their requirements

• The configuration | The business specific settings to get things working again

• Time scales and priorities | Which system will be configured first and how long will it take?

A well thought out and well planned disaster recovery document should be able to be followed by anyone with some technical knowledge, it shouldn't be for specific use by a particular company.

With careful planning a disaster just might not be such a disaster after all.

If you would like to discuss your disaster recovery planning requirements in further detail, please do not hesitate to contact us using our web contact form or by calling us on 01527 908646.