Disaster Recovery Planning and Risk Management

Balancing disaster recovery planning with risk management will save your company money in the long run while offering adequate protection from the most likely disasters. Ideally, a disaster recovery plan will protect your company from every foreseeable disaster and return your company to full operations in the shortest possible amount of time. Unfortunately, this is cost prohibitive. You simply cannot afford to protect your organization against every possible disaster. Selecting which scenarios and how to protect your company against them is called risk management.

Disaster Recovery with Risk Management

One company thought that storing their daily data backup in a fireproof safe in the basement was adequate protection against a disaster. That thinking changed when there was a flood and seven days later it was discovered that the safe was not waterproof. Statistics show that 75% of the businesses which experience a significant disaster fail within six months.

Remember that your company is a series of interconnected systems. If a disaster disables any one of those systems it could bring your entire company to a standstill. Arbitrarily picking one area to protect and not another will doom your company if disaster strikes. Therefore, concentrate your disaster recovery planning efforts on business continuation.

The hardest part of disaster recovery planning is asking your employees on the disaster recovery planning team to work through different disaster scenarios. You actually have to think of what bad things could happen to your company. When defining disaster scenarios think in terms of what area of your company will be affected and the duration that area will be out of operation.

Scope of disaster examples:

• Isolated area of your operations/office/building:
  • Extended duration: fire in closet destroys phone system, water pipe breaks over servers
    
  • Short duration: flu bug infects customer service department
    
• Entire operations/office/building:
  
  • Extended duration: fire destroys entire office, shooter onsite, computer virus attack
    
  • Short duration: sewage backup causes an evacuation, computer virus attack
    
• Isolated small geographic area (e.g. approximately a city block):
  
  • Extended duration: flood, tornado, civil unrest
    
  • Short duration: power loss, police action
    
• Large geographic area (e.g. Entire city or several counties)
  
  • Extended duration: hurricane, earthquake, wildfire
    
  • Short duration: power outage, storm
    

Data Backup Planning Is Essential for Disaster Recovery

Any disaster recovery plan must take into account people, property, and priorities. By this we mean the employees that are essential to bring operations back online, with the necessary equipment and resources to do their jobs, in the order that best facilitates the recovery of the company.

In addition to all of this, you must have your data backups accessible in a timely manner in order to restore them to your recovery servers. The best solution is to store your data backups in multiple offsite locations. This can quickly become a logistical and security nightmare if you have a significant volume of data.

One affordable solution is to use the Internet to back up your data. iSCSI is a technology that uses backup devices located in various geographic locations by using the Internet to transport and back up your data. iSCSI stands for Internet Small Computer System Interface. Originally developed for storage area networks that ran over Ethernet, it can now run over any IP-based network, including the Internet.

Also remember laptops and portable devices that carry critical data for your company. If these devices are lost, stolen or destroyed, this too can seriously impact your company. Plan a backup strategy that covers devices like these in order to minimize the impact your company.

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