Thursday, 29 October 2015 Blog ehdf

8 Point Disaster Recovery Checklist

No business is totally immune from disasters. Every year, businesses temporarily shut down—or close forever—because of a natural or man-made disaster.

The best strategy to protecting an organization’s IT operations from experiencing severe data loss in the event of a disaster is to take proactive steps in order to prepare the physical environment, IT infrastructure and staff responsible for managing these areas. In fact, Disaster Recovery (DR) plans are essential for ensuring regulatory compliances and audits.

Below is an 8 point checklist to get you started:

1.Have a written Disaster Recovery plan in place

2.Training your employees on how to implement the disaster recovery plan is an important aspect that cannot be overlooked

3.Consider implementing redundancy across both Data Centre Infrastructure (power, cooling, network etc.) and IT Infrastructure (network, servers, storage, security etc.)

4.Be mindful of where IT systems are located to avoid damage resulting from floods, bursting pipes, fire etc.

5.Consider replication solutions from the Primary Data Center to Secondary/DR Data Centre

6.Consider data recovery solutions in case of disaster

7.Define Disaster Recovery Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and conduct regular drills

8.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, every organization should constantly update their disaster recovery and business continuity plans. We recommend revisiting it at least on a quarterly basis.

Watch this short video to know more