Disaster Recovery Planning

Disaster Recovery, not to be confused with Business Continuity, is the documented process or set of procedures to recover and protect a businesses IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster. A Disaster recovery plan should be developed in conjunction with the business continuity plan. Businesses that fail to have such a solution in place, often experience huge losses – both to your finances and your reputation – in the aftermath of an IT outage.

Businesses cannot always avoid disasters, but with careful planning the effects of a disaster can be minimised. The object if a disaster recovery plan is to minimise downtime and data loss.

Benefits of a Disaster Recovery Plan

Like every insurance plan, there are benefits that can be obtained from the drafting of a disaster recovery plan. Some of these benefits include:

  • Providing a sense of security
  • Minimising risk of delays
  • Guaranteeing the reliability of standby systems
  • Providing a standard for testing the plan
  • Minimising decision-making during a disaster
  • Reducing potential legal liabilities
  • Lowering unnecessarily stressful work environment.

Types of Disaster Recovery Plans

There is no one right type of disaster recovery plan. However, there are three basic strategies that feature in all disaster recovery plans:

Preventive measures

Preventive measures will try to prevent a disaster from occurring. These measures seek to identify and reduce risks. They are designed to mitigate or prevent an event from happening. This may include keeping data backed up and off site, using surge protectors, installing generators and conducting routine inspections.

Detective measures

Detective measures are taken to discover the presence of any unwanted events within the IT infrastructure. Their aim is to uncover new potential threats or unwanted events. These measures include installing fire alarms, using up-to-date antivirus software, holding employee training sessions, and installing server and network monitoring software.

Corrective measures

Corrective measures are aimed to restore a system after a disaster or otherwise unwanted event takes place essentially focusing on fixing or restoring the systems after a disaster. Corrective measures may include keeping critical documents in the Disaster Recovery Plan or securing proper insurance policies, after a “lessons learned” brainstorming session.

How can we help?

Our team of consultants can help safeguard your data and provide advice and support when your business is looking to create a disaster recovery plan.

Our Disaster Recovery reports will cover all aspects of your internal network from servers, to PC’s and communications equipment. Each piece of equipment will be detailed in the report specifying how it may fail, how long a downtime can be expected, and steps that could be taken to reduce this downtime.

Once you have a Disaster Recovery in place we can work with you to test your plan. This is key to ensure that you will know what to expect in a disaster situation. Additionally, when testing it, the findings will help you customise your plan based on the specific needs of your business. Several things to keep in mind when testing the plan include: knowing how long it will take to retrieve a server backup; being able to access data even if you can’t get to the office; and being able to access un-corrupted copies of software if the system shuts down because of a computer bug.

With a disaster recovery plan in place, if a disaster should strike, no matter what happens your business will have a clear, actionable way to get up and running as quickly as possible.

The Next Step…

To find our more about disaster recovery planning and we can help protect your business please contact our team on 01392 824022 or email us at info@amesolutions.co.uk.

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