Server Management

Disaster recovery planning can be overwhelming, and it can be difficult to know where to start. Organizations should begin by answering one important question: what will the costs in lost revenue be if a real disaster occurs?

Conducting a business impact assessment in the early phases of disaster recovery planning assists with mapping business processes to applications and helps define expectations. In addition, organizations should classify applications according to their importance and financial impact, and determine their recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives. These steps help clearly define which applications must be up and running first and how quickly this must occur.

Key best practices for disaster recovery planning include the following:

• Closely analyze single points of failure: A single point of failure in a critical component can disrupt well-engineered redundancies and resilience in the rest of a system.

• Plan for worst-case scenarios: Downtime can have many causes, including operator error, component failure, software failure and planned downtime, as well as building- or city-level disasters. Organizations should be sure that their disaster recovery plans account for even worst-case scenarios.

• Clearly document recovery processes: Documentation is critical to the success of a disaster recovery program. Organizations should write and maintain clear, concise, detailed steps for failover so that secondary staff members can manage a failover should primary staff members be unavailable.

• Create test plans and scripts: Test plans and scripts should be created and followed step-by-step to help ensure accurate testing. These plans should include integration testing — silo testing alone does not accurately reflect multiple applications going down simultaneously.

• Retest regularly: Organizations should take advantages of opportunities for disaster recovery testing such as new releases, code changes or upgrades. At a minimum, each application should be retested every year.

• Perform comprehensive practice: Organizations should practice their master recovery plans, not just application failover. For example, staff members need to know where to report if a disaster occurs, critical conference bridges should be set up in advance, a command center should be identified, and secondary staff resources should be assigned in case the event stretches over multiple days.

• Track audit scores: Organizations should maintain scorecards on the disaster recovery compliance of each application, as well as who is testing and when. Maintaining scorecards generally helps increase audit scores.

10 Best Practices for Disaster Recovery Planning

Adhering to best practices can be critical to the success of a disaster recovery implementation. The following are 10 of the most important considerations identified by Dell when planning such a deployment:

1. Articulate the need in financial terms.
2. Use hard data to create a risk profile.
3. Identify the critical resources.
4. Think beyond the data center.
5. Eliminate or mitigate single points of failure.
6. Assume that everything is going to fail.
7. Consider a virtualization data center strategy.
8. Recognize potential vendor weaknesses.
9. Keep disaster recovery capabilities up-to-date.
10. Perform tests on a regular basis.