Sunday, December 30, 2012

Disaster Recovery For Beginners

By Mike Ryan


If you've recently been promoted to manager and you're unfamiliar with business management, disaster recovery is one of the first tasks you should start learning. This is particularly vital (and critical) if you're in an area where disasters like thunder storms and floods happen regularly.

If you're feeling a bit overwhelmed (since disaster recovery is a whole business method with a lot of nitty-gritty aspects), don't fret. We're here to acquaint you with your new buddy, disaster recovery.

Disaster recovery is a set of procedures and processes that a company does to mitigate the effects of disasters. This focuses on IT, so don't worry too much about human resources and other aspects that keep the company running just yet.

"Disaster" can be natural or man-made. By natural, we indicate floods and storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and so forth. There's nothing you can do to counteract these things from happening. The best you can do is to soften the blow to your IT system (and your own business). Man-made disasters are created (obviously) by individuals. This can vary from beverage spills to fires to even major hacking. You can put safeguards to avoid man-made disasters, but it is best to still have a recovery plan in your head if they do occur.

Your company needs disaster recovery because it relies on IT and networking for its day-to-day functions. Most businesses nowadays rely so heavily on IT to the point that any interruption to its operations deals a critical blow to the company. IT is so commonly used it's practically a basic need, but it's also very vulnerable. Every aspect of your IT system, from your hardware to your software, is subject to many threats. This is why disaster recovery is so important. Your IT system needs to be saved and its operations resumed ASAP so you can minimize your loss.

You'll find three kinds of control measures you must use in your disaster recovery program. These are:

1. Preventive measures - these are things you do to stop these so-called "accidents" from occurring in the first place. You can't do much to stop natural calamities, but you can do so much to prevent man-made ones from occurring. Think firewalls and safety rails 2. Detective steps - things you do to identify if something bad has occured. Think antivirus, but on a more substantial size (but indeed, an antivirus is a detective strategy). Alarms are also typical of your detective measure. 3. Corrective measure - what you need to do after an emergency has happened. Some examples are reboots and setting up of backup copies. All these measures should be tested consistently in order to look for flaws.

Any kind of disaster recovery plan will include constant system backups. It's crucial that you make off-site back-ups just in case your website is jeopardized. This way even if your on-site IT system is wrecked, you can still continue parts of your website some place else. Given it's not a whole 100% recovery, but from time to time the best you can expect is to keep only the core procedures complete.

It's important that your disaster recovery plan is integrated into the company's business continuity plan. Pay attention to things such as risk management and business continuity. There's no such thing as a fail-safe plan. Always remember to prioritize. Only then can you be sure you'll save the most important processes and keep the company running.




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