Operating a business without a DR strategy is a lot like renting a car without insurance: once an incident occurs you will forever regret not having it. Once you’ve decided you can’t live with the risk and therefore need a DR strategy, there are two basic paths to set up a DR plan.
The first is to harden your primary site. This means spending time and money to protect your existing site against common, potential threats, or it can mean selecting another primary site that’s more secure. The second option is to establish a secondary site dedicated to your disaster recovery strategy. Which path should you opt for? Answer these six questions to make the best decision:
1. Do You Already Have Access to an “Internal” Recovery Site?
Does your organization own space that could be transformed into a recovery site? A satellite office or storage facility with some unused space in reasonable proximity to the required services and infrastructure could work well. If it is fitted with HVAC, security, communications, and other utilities, then it’s an ideal environment to host your recovery site. Without these built-in advantages, you will need to spend the resources to condition, equip, and activate it.
2. Do You Have the Internal Skillsets?
Not only do you need the budget and the time, you also need the expertise to build, test, support, and maintain your DR recovery processes. If not, you will need to contract recovery services to support them. You have two options: to recruit or assign and develop internal specialized people to manage the recovery systems or to strike service arrangements (and potentially share) dedicated, paid experts.
3. Do You Have the Capital Available?
You may have a secondary site, but it’s not worth using if you don’t have the budget to prepare it properly as a DR recovery site. It is far too risky to run your computers in an unconditioned space. You need to invest in the proper improvements (such as heating & cooling), as well as communications and security infrastructure, emergency and uninterruptible power supply (UPS), etc. If you are lacking the funds for such upgrades, consider other options; proper conditioning is non-negotiable in a viable DR site.
4. Is It Better to Virtualize Everything?
A third option is to increase efficiencies by consolidating and virtualizing all of your IT operations by “renting” everything: racks, communication interfaces, redundant power supplies, monitoring, servers, storage capacity and other virtualizable resources. This is the kind of solution found through many Cloud services such as IBM or Sungard and is a viable option when internal resources and infrastructure aren’t up to the task.
5. Would Shared Services Suit Your Needs?
Another possibility is a co-location or facility management system where you share costs of a site but have a peer or business partners manage your disaster recovery process. This is a good choice if your equipment is already owned, written-off, and not at end-of-life and you can operate in a facility with trustworthy collaborators who share your goals (i.e. not-for-profits, NGOs and government services). It may have comparable costs and provide you more control and flexibility.
6. Why Not Just Harden Your Primary Site?
When faced with an increased risk at their primary site, some organizations simply choose to better protect their facility and systems “in situ”. In most cases, this amounts to eliminating single points of failure (such as adding more UPS battery life or new emergency power generation), and ensuring you’re less vulnerable to the “small stuff” such as the short-term power disturbances (e.g. spikes, surges, sags, brief fluctuations/outages) that only last seconds or minutes instead of hours or days.
Committing to a disaster recovery strategy is the first and most important step. But to choose a DR strategy that suits the unique needs and constraints of your business, there are several paths you can take depending on your organization’s capacity and capabilities. Consider these questions carefully with a DR expert to develop a custom-made solution that steadies your organization when faced with the worst imaginable threat.
