Disaster Recovery

More and more businesses are taking the plunge and establishing disaster recovery programs throughout every company department. You may have heard the stories of government departments losing data files or a business had its laptop stolen. You never hear much about the companies who go bankrupt because of a disaster and to be honest, the statistics are concerning.

The Fear Factor:

60% of companies that lose their data will shut down within 6 months of the disaster.
Look all around the internet and you’ll find similar statistics so I don’t think we’ll need to scare you into creating a disaster recovery program for your data.

What is disaster recovery?

From Wikipedia: Disaster recovery is the process, policies and procedures of restoring operations critical to the resumption of business, including regaining access to data (records, hardware, software, etc.), communications (incoming, outgoing, toll-free, fax, etc.), workspace, and other business processes after a natural or human-induced disaster.
We have tape backups, it’s working for us

From time to time we hear people say they use tape backups so they are all set for recovering data after a disaster. What we don’t usually hear is the policies and procedures that are in place to evoke a data restore or lack of.

Getting the full picture for restoring data

Performing a single nightly backup may or may not prevent more business loss after a disaster strikes. Having no procedures in place for restoring data the business has a very high probability rate of failing soon after.

  • The rebuilding of effected computers and their configuration
  • Is there any expertise required for retrieving the data?
  • How was the data backed up?
  • How is the data being transferred back onto the systems?
  • How much data is being recovered?
  • Do the systems require testing before staff handover?

Disaster Recovery Training

There is no point on having a disaster recovery plan if nobody else knows how to initiate it. Let’s say the D&R person has taken a sick day and it just so happens a disaster strikes, no matter how big or small. It makes better business sense to have a number of staff trained on how to recovery data and the D&R process.