Tuesday, 30 December 2014 Blog ehdf

8 Mistakes to Avoid in Your Disaster Recovery Planning Process

Many companies realize that their disaster recovery (DR) strategy fails because of the mistakes that were made during the planning phase. We highlight the top 8 commonly made mistakes to avoid when building your DR plan:

1.Absence of a comprehensive documentation: Preparing a disaster recovery plan involves multiple steps. It is important to comprehensively document the DR plan and record this in an electronic document that can be retrieved off-site in the event of a disaster

2.Insufficient Training: Training your employees on how to implement various steps of the disaster recovery plan is an important aspect that cannot be overlooked. This will help them to respond effectively in the event of an actual disaster and also ease the stress and anxiety that accompanies a disaster

3.Failure to develop a communication plan: You should document ways to communicate with key employees and vendors in case you do not have access to your company’s computer systems. This should include employees’ home phone numbers, employees’ cell phone numbers, address, and key vendor contacts and phone numbers

4.Low commitment from the senior management: Any disaster recovery plan will fail if there is no commitment in terms of time, money and resources from the higher management

5.Lack of detail: We recommend including details of what is required to recover each critical area of the organization and who is responsible for coordinating the recovery process

6.Planning only for the worst case scenario: Don’t just prepare for the worst case scenario, but also take into consideration human errors as they too pose substantial risk to business

7.Not testing the plan: Testing the plan must be accomplished before the event of an actual disaster. Tasks that are overlooked will be made very clear during the testing phase of your disaster recovery plan

8.Not Prioritizing: Understand the business requirements and be selective about the order in which applications and services need to be brought back online first after a disaster

Apart from the above, never stop updating the disaster recovery and business continuity plan. We recommend revisiting it at least on a quarterly basis.