Lessons on Disaster Recovery
A Backup Article Contributed by Melissa Larose
Lessons on Disaster Recovery
The road to disaster recovery is littered with horror stories. When is it time to invoke your disaster recovery plan? What event or level of event would that involve? Oh, you don't know? You mean you don't have a disaster recovery plan in place? Maybe you better consider making that happen ASAP. Here's why.
Disaster Recovery Needs Could Strike at Any Time
Disaster comes in all shapes, sizes, and descriptions. Some of the most disastrous situations are man made. Employees bent on creating scenarios that allow them over time can do great damage to your equipment in attempting to make overtime happen consistently.
Vengeful employees can do the same when they feel justified to wreak havoc on projects out of spite. Damaging data, equipment, or processes can bring down production lines, customer service access or cost the company in clients. Powering down systems unnecessarily due to ignorance and poor training can cause a myriad of problems including data loss and the need to reset and check each computer and its processes. This can take days of overtime depending on the size of the company.
Disaster Recovery Planning Takes Imagination
It takes a great imagination to cover all the possibilities when planning for disaster recovery. Who would ever dream that terrorism might be fall your company? And in the form of a bomb or explosion of some type. What would your company do for a recovery of this type?
A disaster can start very small and become large over time. Consider what you might do if your typical number of computer malfunctions in a year was four. Suddenly it was four every quarter. Impending disaster? Could very well be. How would you handle this to head it off. It could turn into a total crash of your system. How would you identify what was going on? A well thought out disaster recovery plan can help sort through the possibilities.
What if the sabotage that was occurring was originating with your company but not happening at your place of business? Someone was using your equipment to cause disaster elsewhere. The disaster may come in the form of bad publicity and liability. How would this type of incident be addressed in your disaster recovery plan?
Disaster recovery needs can involve every aspect of a business. One unprepared for move can wreak havoc on the bottom line.
Disaster Recovery Pays
Here are some ways to make disaster recovery pay. Always make sure your insurance is re-evaluated and up to date on a yearly basis. Businesses change and grow. Equipment is upgraded and processes can be dropped. All of this can lead to a different valuation and ultimately cost. As much as a higher cost of insurance might make the stomach swell it may be the right thing to do in the case of disaster recovery.
Re-evaluate your disaster recovery plan on a yearly basis, or more often. Employee's leave and new ones arrive. Phone numbers change, processes change and consequently the disaster recovery plan needs to also.
