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Rare in IT, the title is self-explanatory! To rephrase though, it’s the process a firm goes through to get into a position where they can come back from a catastrophe, in a reasonable period of time, having suffered no major data loss as a result of the event. Disaster Recovery Planning, or DRP, is the first step towards achieving this highly desirable state of system robustness. The Business Continuity (or BC, for those in the know) refers to a firm’s ability to keep running, to some degree or another, during a Disaster.
As you might expect, the cornerstone of any sort of DRP will be backups. These can take many forms depending on data type, volume of data, and the speed with which restoration might be necessary. The absolute most important thing about backups though, is that they are;
Aside from taking backups (copies) of data, there are a number of other steps that can be taken to mitigate risk and to maximise up-time
RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks)
If you have a server (and are not planning, for whatever reason, to decommission on your journey to Cloud, see below), ensure it’s running a RAID-1 or RAID-5 Array, which provides some protection against physical drive failure
Previous Versions Are Cool
Windows 7, 10 and Server 2008 / 2012 / 2016 have a great feature called “Previous Versions”. It’s basically a snapshot service that Windows runs to enable you to quickly restore a file from a previous day. It’s free, it’s easy, why not use it?
Use the Power of the Cloud!.
Like anything else with IT, there are multiple ways to approach this (full Hosted Desktop, Hybrid Solutions with local storage replicated off-site, and Office 365 email, or just Cloud-based backup). The main point of Cloud solutions is that is that they can offer;
In short, if BC has been done well, your key business processes can continue:-
After the disaster has passed (fire put out, flood mopped up, internet connection restored, server replaced, you name it!) normality can return. At this point, the hard work had paid off and the Data Manager can pat himself on the back on the basis that no data has been lost, and administrative productivity continued undiminished. A post-Disaster review is usually recommended at this point, so that fine-tuning can take place; there’s always room for improvement, right? This improvement might not even be a technological one but can also comprise cultural procedures and amendments to those sections of the “Office Manual” that deal with staff procedures, protocols etc. In any event, if there is a mechanism in there for an introspective look at what happened, it provides the opportunity to make those improvements and determine what happened in the first place, the latter of which will be very useful in helping to avoid similar issues in the future.
If this article has piqued your interest, please feel free to call on 01302 540280 or hit the Contact Us page.