Disaster Recovery Support: It s Practice, Practice, Practice by Jennifer Burl

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. While this old joke has made the rounds and then some, it still offers sound advice. Getting where you want to go takes practice, especially in the area of disaster recovery support: Being ready isn't just about having the best technology in place, or hiring a great provider. It takes practice to be prepared.

Time and Time Again

Practice (or in other words testing ) isn't fun. It means doing the basic same tasks over and over again, until they become second nature. Refinement comes next taking what's been learned and improving on it. The end result is a better performance, but it takes time.

It's easy to seek out a provider that promises to recover all of your data in the event of an outage, disaster or local server failure, but without proper testing of your plan, your company will not be ready when something goes wrong.

Playing for Keeps

The goal of robust disaster recovery support services, is not simply to provide an in case of solution, but develop a process based on experience that reviews emerging threats, tests current systems and evaluates the entire process from start to finish. This practice can make the prospect of a disaster being on stage in front of bright lights and a potentially devastating audience far less stressful for your company.

It goes like this: While you may have a disaster recovery plan in place, it may not perform equally well under different pressures. Long-term power loss due to a storm, for example, is different from data corrupted because of malware. Rather than passively accepting potential problems, a company can instead work with a recovery service provider in four areas.

The first area comprises reviewing any existing threats, and determining if new ones are imminent. Next is testing your DR plan through a simulated disaster to evaluate all aspects of the plan including the transportation of your data to a hot site or alternate recovery location. The test must then be evaluated to determine if any failure points exist, as well as to determine root causes. Lastly, companies need to implement any lessons learned to improve the overall disaster recovery plans.

Lowering Your Stress, Improving Your Performance

That's the role of continued disaster testing and refinement. When an unexpected event occurs when it comes time to showcase your disaster recovery plan on the real-world stage your investment in testing, in practice, means you won't have to worry about developing response strategies on the fly. Disasters are by nature unpredictable, but reviewing, testing and evaluation help limit their impact. Practice makes (almost) perfect.

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2013/service-lines/data-backup-and-recov...
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