disaster recovery solutions

Surviving a Disaster in 2016: 6 Tips for Disaster Recovery Planning

When coming up with a disaster recovery plan, you should understand that its success is based on having a realistic and well understood set of objectives. You should understand that these objectives should be based on the business need. When preparing a disaster recovery plan, you should go for a system that can recover and document everything. In order to make the plan effective, disaster recovery solutions such as DR Solutions by TrueNorth should be considered in the plan. Businesses should adopt new technologies that reduce the cost of operation and must always ensure data backups are in good condition and are kept in a secure location.

Keep in mind the following tips when creating an effective disaster recovery plan:

The plan should be linked to the business

Although people are aware of the benefits of an effective disaster recovery plan, they usually complain about cost-related issues.  When the benefits of the plan surpass the cost, the cost needs to be the second instead of the first priority. Preparing for a disaster should be a burden, but it should be incorporated with the business’ day-to-day priorities.

Disaster recovery plan should be updated always

Disaster recovery planning should always be a part of the day-to-day operations in the IT department. The plan should be maintained and kept up-to-date once an element in the IT settings changes. The disaster recovery plan will ultimately fail if its management is not a priority to the company leadership.

Establish practical recovery objectives

It is critical for organizations to set practical recovery point objectives and recovery time goals. Moreover, the set objectives and goals should be attainable. These objectives and goals should be established and prioritized in accordance to the plan’s policies. It is important to determine how current the data is before a disaster and the amount of data lost before the recovery plan is put in place.

The disaster recovery plan should be tested

Most IT departments find disaster recovery testing to be a major challenge; however, there is a high possibility of problems occurring if the recovery has not been tested to the application level. Thus regular testing is required to ensure that recoveries are successful and are carried out within the required timeframe. Although disaster recovery tests may lead to operational disruptions, they should include end-to-end testing all the way to the production. Software quality testing should be adopted in disaster recovery plan testing.

Substitute recovery services

There should be clear guidelines defining who in case of a disaster will be responsible for recovering operations and initiating the disaster recovery plan.

Cost consideration

Disaster recovery and its requirements may seem expensive and most organizations have a great deal of difficulty in absorbing the costs. In order to address the costs related to disaster recovery, it should be integrated into the organization’s standard operations as extensively as possible. Organizations should treat disaster recovery as an investment and should be willing to spend money on it or accept the risk. However, there are new technologies emerging to make this cost effective.