To determine your organization’s DR readiness, review and rank yourself on a scale of 1 to 4 on the following 9 topics. We include a chart at the end so you can review your answers.
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An untested DR plan is only a strategy. While most organizations believe they have a robust DR plan and can recover their key business applications in case of a disaster, many do not test their plans to identify gaps or challenges. Thorough testing of your DR plan is the only way to discover configuration details, application dependencies, hard-coded IP addresses, host file entries, software license limitations, and other factors that should be reflected in your documentation and addressed by your IT team so that your organization is prepared for a crisis.
In the previously cited Forrester/DRJ survey, only 17% of the organizations conducted a full test of their DR plans within the last year while 21% do not test their DR plans at all. Organizations should test their recovery process annually at a minimum. For mission critical systems, we recommend quarterly testing, especially if these systems have undergone updates or configuration changes. DR plans typically fail when they do not keep up-to-date with system changes.
These assets may include user files, databases, core applications, server images, and IT infrastructure. Will all elements of your IT environment be available and operational during a disaster? To help mitigate DR costs, some companies rank IT systems and data based on their importance. You might categorize bronze, silver, or gold resources in your DR plan to set recovery-point and time objectives, along with back-up, retention, and archival, policies.
Your protection solution should include multiple options. As we mentioned in our DRaaS misconceptions post, your backup strategy should include:
RPO has to do with backup frequency, representing the amount of data that your company is willing to lose or reenter after an outage. If a disaster occurs between backups, can you afford to lose five minutes’ worth of data updates? Or five hours? Or a full day? RPO represents how fresh recovered data needs to be. So, the shorter an RPO, the more critical the data. The backup process must be robust enough to replicate data in the shortest amount of time between the original and replicated copies.
RTO relates to the recovery timeline: once a disaster hits, how much time can your business afford to lose from that first notification until normal operations are restored? Can your business, and its reputation, withstand a long stretch of downtime? Should your company RTO be counted in days, hours, or minutes? In certain environments, such as in retail, every second of downtime could represent thousands of dollars in lost revenue. Other systems, such as an HR database, may be offline for several hours without negatively impacting the business. Your company RTO is a key DR plan metric and it must be identified by application for all mission-critical systems, networks, databases, and other IT resources. The shorter your RTO – that is, the less downtime the organization can afford to lose — the more active, and responsive your DR plan needs to be, to minimize recovery costs and lost productivity.
According to DR Journal’s 2020 poll of organizations that experienced a disaster in the last 5 years, 38% of respondents are still not aware of the total cost of downtime. This may speak to a disconnect between senior management and DR staff about the impact of lost data or applications on the business. For how long could your business survive?
Does your senior management support the need for disaster recovery? Do you have an approved a budget for DR? Has your IT staff been trained in DR procedures, and have other stakeholders run through disaster scenarios with them to determine your organization’s readiness? Ideally, DR should be an organizational function, with a dedicated staff; a budget; an ongoing schedule of activities that includes plan reviews; exercises; and staff training. But we don’t live in an ideal world. AllConnected understands that most companies struggle to provide a comprehensive DR experience inhouse, which is why we provide it through our smartConnect, supportConnect and/or cloudConnect managed service offerings, depending upon your company’s goals and requirements.
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