Disaster Recovery & Why You Need It

As a savvy businessperson, it is very important for you to
be able to plan for unexpected events to occur. Disaster
Recovery is like buying insurance for your business; we all
hate paying those insurance premiums but if the unexpected
actually does happen to us, we are always glad that we
signed up for that insurance plan!

In business, there are many more variables to take into
account. Because of the wide-open nature of most business
nowadays, it is more difficult to cover all of the
contingencies and for this main reason it is important that
any disaster recovery plan be flexible enough to be used in
more than one situation. Most businesses will not get very
far in trying to predict the types of disasters that might
occur and indeed most businesses don’t even try to do that.
The best disaster recovery plans are the ones that are able
to be utilized regardless of the specifics of the disaster
itself.

Disaster Recovery is actually just a very small portion of
a larger plan that businesses need to have. The Business
Continuity Plan (BCP) covers all aspects of a business and
companies that have a very detailed BCP are more likely to
do better in the long run than companies that don’t think
about those kinds of things.

Disaster Recovery in More Detail

So what makes a good disaster recovery plan? Well, there
are a few things that are very important considerations to
keep in mind when designing a disaster recovery plan. A few
of these very vital considerations are discussed briefly
below.

Versatility: One of the oldest jokes in the book is about
the person who had a contingency plan for his own
contingency plan. This may seem a little redundant, but
this is one area of your business where you want
redundancies. If an unexpected situation occurs that
bypasses or otherwise renders ineffective your initial
contingency plan, it is very important to have another
contingency plan to turn to. Some owners may be loathe to
spend the extra money to come up with an additional
contingency plan, but remember the insurance comparison
from the start of this article; contingencies are either
annoying or a Godsend depending on what happens to you.

Flexibility: If you are determined to only have one
disaster recovery plan, then it needs to be flexible.
Recovering data and other potential losses in the event of
a disaster is something that all businesses think about,
but only a truly flexible disaster recovery plan, with no
disaster specific (i.e. planning for a specific disaster)
contingencies in place, will be able to truly expect the
unexpected and act accordingly. These types of plans are
extremely difficult to create, which is why the versatility
of multiple contingency disaster recovery plans is more
desirable.

Final Remarks

However you decide to go about doing disaster recovery, be
sure that you understand what it is you want to recover in
the event of a disaster taking place and make sure that
your plan is complete in that regard.

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Lee Smith writes about disaster recovery for business.
http://www.networklondon.co.uk/disaster-recovery.html