What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery is principally a methodology that incorporates tools and procedures, which enables businesses or individuals to ensure continuity of their technology infrastructure and systems, should an event occur which renders technology unusable and therefore disrupts the operations of their business.

For any business, large or small, the loss of technology systems these days has a major impact on how they run their operations and interface with their customers. Large corporations have disaster recovery plans in place and therefore business continuity as part of their compliance. In most cases, they have alternative back up sites, so they can effectively pick up and continue with the minimum of disruption. The proportion of small business that have such plans in place is significantly lower.

Natural and Man-made Disasters

Disasters can strike in many forms, but broadly they fall into two main categories, natural disasters and man-made. We remember only too well the flooding that occurred in the UK, which affected so many businesses and individuals alike. Also, the spate of cyber-attacks that affected the likes of the NHS, brought massive disruption to many of their Trusts throughout the country. These are two large scale examples of disasters, which can impact a business. Small scale disasters can be just as debilitating.

Will your back-up work when its needed?

Disaster recovery will only work, if its properly implemented in the first place. This involves taking a holistic view of the business operations and ensuring that all aspects of technology used, and the impacts of the loss are fully considered.

Disaster recovery planning is technically a subset of business continuity planning, its prime focus therefore is aimed at the areas of applications, software, networking and hardware, but the aspect of business continuity must also be considered should the facility where the business is run, become unusable.

A good disaster recovery plan should consider the following methodology.

  1. Prevention – preventing an event from occurring in the first instance
  2. Detection – detecting or discovering possible threats
  3. Correction measures – correction or restoration the system following a disaster or an event.

When was the last time you backed up your system?

We have spoken before about the importance of backing up your systems and the different types of back up that can be performed.

However, backing up your systems is one thing checking that they are going to work is another.

As part of any disaster recovery plan the importance of ensuring your recovery systems are always up to date, maintained and you have a clear methodology of how to implement them is equally important.

Should you wish to review your disaster recovery plans and back-up systems, please give us a call on 01737 824003 or send us an email.