A guide to disaster
recovery
The term disaster recovery
involves certain procedures, processes and policies and refers to the
maintenance of a company’s technology infrastructure should a disaster occur.
Disaster recovery forms part of the
process known as business continuity planning and focuses on how to resume all
communication should the worst happen. This includes networking, hardware, data,
applications and some other tools. This business continuity planning also
involves the preparation for the company’s non-technical infrastructure like
reputation, crisis communication, facilities and key personnel protection.
Disasters can be divided into two
categories - natural disaster and man-made disasters. Natural disasters such as
hurricanes, earthquakes, fires and floods are traditionally difficult to
foresee but taking preventative action to ensure a solid recovery plan is in
place is imperative for businesses. Man-made disasters can be unintentional or
intentional causing huge losses in down time, communication and ultimately profits.
These include hackers, viruses, burglary, sabotage, walkouts and accidents.
Control
measures in disaster recovery
Control measures in disaster
recovery planning are some mechanisms or steps that can eliminate or reduce IT
security threats. They include:
Preventive measures – these focus on stopping
an event of disaster from happening.
Detective measures – these measures are
focused on discovering or detecting unwanted happenings before they occur.
Corrective measures – these measures are
focused on restoring or correcting the system after an event or disaster.
Top
ten disaster recovery planning tips
1. Store
your system passwords in at least two separate secure locations - only one of
which is in the same building as your IT equipment. At least two staff have
should have access to them.
2.
Document, document, document! Make sure that the whole recovery process to get
you up and running again is documented, and includes the locations of system
recovery and other critical discs. Make sure that key staff are familiar with
these.
3.
Establish an automated system to notify critical staff of disaster by text.
These staff should be thoroughly trained so that they can perform basic
disaster recovery/back-up tasks unsupervised. You may be able to do this through an
arrangement with a third-party service provider.
4.
Practice your
disaster recovery plan on a quarterly basis or more. This not only hones your disaster
recovery team's skills but it will also familiarize new staff with the
procedure, and ensures that your disaster recovery strategy is kept up to date
by revealing any issues with new equipment or software.:
5. Use
RAID
(Redundant Array of Independent Disks) as an onsite backup solution. This is used to increase uptime in light of a server failure.
RAID" is an
umbrella term for computer data storage schemes that can divide and replicate
data among multiple hard disk drives. The different schemes/architectures
are named by the word RAID followed by a number, as in RAID 0, RAID 1, etc.
Each one gives different trade-offs of protection against data loss, capacity
and speed. Using at least Raid Level 1 will ensure data
duplication if there is a fault with your server. To find out more about RAID,
visit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks
6.
Use an FTP server to back up your data on the internet. FTP backup provides the
most secure and reliable way to back up personal data. Storing files on a
remote backup server ensures adequate protection against hardware failures,
natural disasters, theft and most other causes of data loss.
7. Tape
back ups are also still used by a lot of organisations to ensure their daily
data is stored off site. Tapes that are used on a daily basis should be replaced
every six to nine months to avoid deterioration. Whether you use tape backups or an FTP
server, being able to back up your data away from your organisation something
every organisation should view as imperative.
8. Get
yourself the best, longest-life, most uninterruptible power supply you can.
Then get an additional battery back-up for your cache to go with it.
9. Don't
neglect to protect yourself from random theft, vandalism and employee malice;
they can be just as disastrous as anything else. At the very least ensure that
the door to your data/server room is locked, day and night.
10. An
automatically closing fire door to the data/server room will keep fire and
smoke out of the room for a surprisingly long time
The destruction of useful
equipments or documents does not destroy a business; bad preparation does. Simple
disaster recovery planning techniques, which may on the surface seem
inconsequential can save an organisation from going out of business should
disaster strike.
