Disaster Recovery Best Practices

TeraGo released a white paper detailing disaster recovery best practices. They performed a survey in partnership with IDC Canada of different Canadian organizations’ disaster recovery plans and found most were not prepared. In fact, 45% of the surveyed organizations admitted they could not identify the data crucial to running their business and the potential threats to their IT infrastructure.

They included seven steps for creating an effective disaster recovery plan:

1. Perform a risk assessment and and business impact analysis to determine critical infrastructure, threats and potential consequences.
2. Define RTOs (recovery time objectives) and RPOs (recovery point objectives) for crucial services. In the event of an outage or disaster, how much data loss is acceptable? How long can a service be down before impeding the production of the business?
3. Develop an easy-to-use procedure that gives instructions for recovering damaged IT assets and returning them to normal performance.
4. Simulate a disaster and plan for all scenarios. Teach suitable staff members the different processes and procedures needed in disaster recovery situations. Who does what, when, and how.
5. Make sure there is at least one backup staff member with critical skills to pass on their knowledge.   
6. Define policies and test frequently. Testing can be done on site, off site or with a vendor who can confirm the validity of your procedures.
7. Document the time-to-remediation for all facets of your IT infrastructure to mitigate the negative impact of downtime.

You can download the white paper here and find more information regarding disaster recovery here.

Sources:
http://www.bitpipe.com/fulfillment/1505152587_272
https://www.ready.gov/business/implementation/IT