The purpose of any disaster recovery plan is to mitigate the loss of business continuity in the face of a catastrophic event. It is the way any forward-looking organization insures itself against any prolonged, massive loss of production and capacity.
It stands to reason, then, that facilitating a DR plan shouldn’t result in a significant trade-off of regular IT service or performance. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to put your organization through any inconvenient downtime or resource shortages when in fact you are trying to protect it from unavailability and lost resources.
Here are three key strategies for facilitating a DR plan while maintaining service levels with existing systems, and managing costs.
Strategy 1: Emergency and Business Continuity Planning
The first and most critical thing any organization can do to begin its DR planning is to establish and rank its own business priorities. Every organization must be prepared to tier its most important operational functions in order to determine which are the most important IT functions to protect and recover.
It is important, then, to undergo a Risk and Threat Assessment, which should be an ongoing, shared, and collective process that ultimately justifies any and all DR planning. (In a world of no risks, there is little need for DR!)
DR planning overlaps and is shareable with Crisis Management (CM) activities, including the creation of lists of key users, system owners and contacts, escalation information, emergency communication methods, budgets, and test exercises. Creating a synergy between DR and CM planning saves a lot of time and resources.
Strategy 2: Embed DR Into Daily IT Routines
Key pieces of IT information and documentation need to be shared with DR coordinators/builders through the course of daily activities. DR will need to reference detailed information such as “as built” network diagrams and software settings. Existing information like server inventories and network topologies can then be updated simultaneously to identify new DR recovery processes and updated documentation.
Done properly, DR-related maintenance activities should not disrupt daily workflow at all. For example, DR requirements can be first tested when your organization upgrades or expands central data storage or when orchestrating an outage while planning major systems developments. Processes to facilitate DR maintenance can be automated without the requirement of major increases of manual involvement.
The goal is to integrate DR into all relevant IT processes of the organization. DR considerations should be included at all major project, enhancement, and change checkpoints, and recovery testing should be represented in all relevant systems test processes.
Strategy 3: Make DR Easier By Rationalizing Your IT Portfolio
The mantra for modernizing and “greening” any IT department is “Consolidate, Simplify, Virtualize.” This approach not only improves efficiency, but it also eases the execution of DR activities.
Consolidation involves reducing the number of locations where computing takes place, eliminating redundant copies of data and unused IT resources like “local copies” of software licences, and centralizing and combining IT equipment, services, and suppliers.
Simplifying the complexity of your IT support environment calls for the elimination of obsolete hardware, any unnecessary, multiple versions of the same products, and reduction of “unique”, or “one-off” software and hardware makes, models, releases, and versions.
In order to virtualize your IT department you need to lower the number of physical connections and pieces of equipment. This is done by combining isolated disks into shared data storage drives, eliminating physical servers through the creation of virtual machines, and reducing the number of physical circuits, racks, and devices.
DR shouldn’t be a drain on your organization’s time and resources. Given the right steps and careful planning, you cannot only increase the efficiency of your IT department, you can also ensure your organization is protected against the downtime and lost production that unforeseen events can bring.
