Before Planning for Disaster Recovery

I posted before The Difference Between Backup and Disaster Recover, I will explain more about disaster recovery, and I hope these information will help you to build an accurate disaster recovery plan that meets your organization strategy and needs.

One of the most important steps for IT people is to create “Business Impact Analysis” (BIA) before planning for disaster recovery at any organization, BIA is essential to success your disaster recovery planning, no matter how you do it whether by using computer software, survey, interview …etc., and by internal team or external team through contract with outsourcing company.

The benefits of BIA are to gather information to help the organization in planning for disaster recovery , design the disaster recovery site and prioritize computer application and software used by business/functional departments and keep the IT people focused on achieving the goals and objectives of disaster recovery.

BIA is a tool to document information about applications; all information will be analyzed to help the organization in disaster recovery planning. Sometimes you need experts to handle analyzing BIAs and document all analysis results to develop accurate disaster recovery plans.

The continent of BIA template is include but not limited to:

          1-      Name of application,

          2-      Department name,

          3-      Work hours for this application (i.e from 8:00 Am to 9:00 Am),

          4-      Number of users,

          5-      Effect on organization ( i.e Reputation, Cost, Legal..etc),

          6-      Key process for the application (i.e Reports to government, customer service, billing…etc.),

          7-      There is any alternative procedure when application is down,

          8-      Related Hardware and Software,

          9-      Infrastructure needed, and

          10-   Application administrator name.

Backup and Disaster Recovery, What the difference?

Do you know what is the difference between backup and disaster recovery? Did you think before about those terms before?

All of us hear about backup, there is always a reminder in our life, you see it in smartphone and with software tips, but disaster recovery is not listed in our terms list it’s not in our dictionary.

Most of small business owners mostly don’t know the difference between backup and disaster recovery, today’s blog, is lowdown of backup vs. disaster recovery, to know the deference.

Backup, what is it?

Let’s start with basics, what is backup? In summary, backup is copying data to storage. This can be through DVD, SAN storage or by means of remotely storage "Cloud".

It is very important to have a backup solution in place. You will protect your data loss in case of employee accidents (delete data), theft (Laptop lost) and technical problems (Server crash); with backup you can restore your data easily.

Disaster Recovery, What is it?

Disaster recovery is similar to backup but disaster recovery used for larger instances. A full image of your servers and disks are mirrored. The image increases the probability to restore your systems faster than re-installing OS and restoring data.

Now read the term “Disaster” does this term make sense to you, don’t get caught up on this term and believe it has to be a major accident. A disaster can be your networks equipment’s and servers are crashes and all of the organization employees no longer work for one day or more. With disaster recovery plan, the organization employees can continue to work using the mirrored systems and servers and IT people work on fixing the problem at main site “Original systems place” while all of business employees are working on the mirrored systems.

Backup is similar to disaster recovery, but disaster recovery is more wider than backup and disaster recovery plan contains backup plans, backup is needed to restore data when case of loss of original data, data in disaster recovery is not needed to restore, employees are moved to work on the mirrored systems in case of data loss or system crash in main data location.