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Q: What should we consider in our Disaster Recovery Plan?
A: Here is a checklist for your Disaster Recovery Plan:
- Analyze your business and rank your business needs in terms of priorities;
-- What business needs have to be back up and running within minutes or hours?
-- What can be down for 24 hours?
-- What services or functions could be down for a week or two weeks?
- Identify and prioritize risks, such as natural disasters, insider threats and physical, as well as cyber, terrorist
attacks. Develop plans and policies to lesson those risks;
- Put together recovery teams with defined personnel, roles, functions and hierarchy;
- Do you have the backup systems in place to keep the business running?
- Are backups automatic and done in periodic intervals, such as every minute, every hour or every day? Figure out your
backup priorities. Not everything needs to be backed up every hour but some things should;
- Don't have all your IT people working in the same place. If something happened to that building, you would lose all of
your talent and it would cripple your ability to get the network up and running again;
- Figure out your biggest over potential failures. Is it power, Internet access, a building or phone lines?
- If you're a software company, is your source code spread around so if something happens to one server or one location,
all isn't lost?
- Map out your network. Know what's on it and where it's located.
- Know the systems running on your network;
- Know where workers are supposed to be located and have contact information for them and their families. Set up
notification procedures, such as calling trees;
- Have contact information for business partners, contractors, consultants and vendors at hand;
- Set up generators to keep your electronics functioning;
- Keep backups off site;
- Have mirrored data centers and servers;
- Do you have a backup ISP or teleco?
- Set up escape routes for your buildings and make sure employees are familiar with them;
- Establish quick-ship programs with vendors to get the equipment you might need to replace to get back in operation;
- Plan for remote access needs in case you suddenly can't work onsite.
Q: What should we consider when choosing a disaster recovery service provider?
A: There are a number of factors to consider when choosing a disaster recovery service provider.
- Data Center infrastructure such as power generator and fire suppression system;
- Facility capacity that can accommodate large server farms;
- Network capacity, particularly Internet network capacity, that can handle terabytes of
data transfer;
- Experience in managing IT infrastructure and operations;
- 24x7x365 Network Operation Center (NOC);
- Service Pricing.
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