Don’t turn away – move your mouse away from the [Back] button, this is absolutely key to your business.

Facts

20% of all companies will suffer fire, theft, flood or storm damage, power failures, terrorism or hardware/software disaster. Of those without a business continuity plan:

• 43% will never re-open
• 80% fail within 13 months
• 53% of claimants never recoup the losses incurred by a disaster
• Less than 50% of all organisations have a business continuity plan
• 43% of companies that do have a business continuity plan do not test it annually
• 80% of companies have not developed any crisis management to provide IT coverage sufficient to keep the business functionally effectively
• 40% of companies that do have crisis management plans do not have a team dedicated to disaster recovery

Source: Aveco / London of Chamber of Commerce

Top Ten Tips

1. Passwords – store two copies of your system passwords in two different geopgraphical locations and ensure that at least two members of staff have access to them.
2. Documentation – document clearly a thorough plan of what to do in the event of a problem and where all relevant data and information is.
3. Notifiation – 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 – 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. Backup Data – No matter how good your disaster recovery plan, it cannot recover data if you neglect to back it up. Make sure there is a routine for backing up data regularly, and ensure it is done. Using at least Raid Level 5 (Raid Level 10 if the budget allows) to ensure data duplication ensures fault tolerance. Build as much redundancy in your system as possible to remove any single points of failure. This includes a multi-path data route to the system, so that you can still access your data if one path fails.
6. Spare Kit – delays in replacing equipment, e.g. hard disks, can delay system getting up and running so don’t be afraid to hold spares – again in seperate locations.
7. Media – A tape archive strategy is crucial. Tapes used on a daily basis should be replaced every six to nine months to avoid deterioration – backups are no use if they cannot be recovered. Other tapes should be replaced on a regular, less frequent, schedule based on the frequency of use. Being able to back up to a remote location is worth almost any price, a fireproof vault is not an alternative to an off-site location.
8. Power – 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. Security – 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. Firedoor – An automatically closing fire door to the data/server room will keep fire and smoke out of the room for a surprisingly long time

Common Mistakes

Don’t get to carried away – a simple well document plan will succeed where a complex and over-engineered solution may fail. Most plans fail due to the lack of backups and poorly trained staff.