I thought I share some tips on creating a practical disaster recovery plan. Most people has a misconception that such plans are large complex and ultimately expensive.
Well I am going to show you how you can have a practical disaster recovery plan for your IT operations without spending a whole bunch of money.
Why have a plan? You do want the business to continue functioning when the data center gets a power blackout, flooded or caught fire? You need to communicate with your customers and suppliers, business systems to support your key business functions. Eg ERP systems for the manufacturing and inventory, the logistics systems for the trucks. Business needs to carry on, so must the IT systems.
Remember disasters can come in bite size too. Let’s say you have 2 disk failures on your RAID 5 file server, rare but it happened to me. Are you going to rely on the server vendor’s 24x7x4 hardware support and go grap a cup of coffee?
I have listed below are some main points of disaster recovery plan. These will branch to other posts when completed. Any topics of interest to you? Drop me a note I will try to include. Note disaster recovery (DR) plans are not business continuity plans (BCP). BCP deals with the identification of threats and risks, creation of the appropriate responses to these issues. DR plans deals with how to do implement these responses.
1. Backup your data. link
2. The importance of the domain controller. link
3. Email. It is always email.
4. Business Applications.