IT Disaster Recovery: An Ounce of Prevention

An ounce of prevention is not only worth the pound of cure, but could make the difference between survival and demise of your organization.

Let’s face it, it is human nature to learn the hard way. We often wait for “it” to happen, then work the rest of our lives to prevent it from happening again. In the case of your business, there may not be a second chance depending on the type of disaster.

You may be thinking, “thank goodness I’m backing up my data, and I can restore it at any time.” Unfortunately, that’s simply not enough in all cases. What if the loss involves more than just a few documents or databases? What if the services which house your data are gone as well, along with all the hardware as a result of a server or facilities disaster? To what location would you restore the data? How long would it take to set up a server, install and configure all of your applications (mail, database, etc.), and restore data?

Ask yourself, “What is my company’s tolerance for downtime?” How long would your email, database, file sharing, and other services need to be down before staff members, clients, and vendors begin to panic and look for alternatives? If you can tolerate several days or weeks of downtime, then you don’t need a disaster recovery and business continuity plan. Otherwise, be thinking seriously about having a second instance of your hardware, applications, services, and data standing by.

As in the case of British Petroleum , disaster spells two separate catastrophes. One is the inability to continue business normally, and the second is the humiliation of disclosing the reason for the problem in the first place: lack of planning.