We live and work in hurricane country, which incidentally, its season is right around the corner. The past several years have proven to be a profound test of our ability to execute business continuity. Some of us have not fared so well.
I’ve experienced business continuity failure because a business continuity plan was not in place and executed. Although I stood ready to bring up a DR Data Facility within hours, disaster recovery was completely compromised because of the lack of a business continuity plan.
If you would like a Business Continuity Plan template at no cost, head over to bakupz.com and download the template. It provides a great start for a small to medium sized business. Most importantly, go through the steps to make it real.
The most important part of successfully implementing a Business Continuity Plan is to understand that it is a team effort and not the responsibility of your IT guy. And, there’s more to disaster recovery than your tape backup. In my case, I had duplicated the primary line of business servers, segmented the network to facilitate turning up another data center and synchronized database servers. I understood the need for DR infrastructure.
In the past, my biggest enemy to pull off disaster recovery was time. Besides needing production ready servers, in time, one might download files from one’s online backup service or recover data from an archived tape, but you cannot use files and data if your infrastructure is damaged. What I would have given to have a production-ready virtual network for active disaster recovery and failover, with “active” production-ready infrastructure images, backed up at regular pre-determined intervals and in real time, and stored for use any time.
If you’re in IT or just very interested in IT, you need to watch this video. It shows how quickly server recovery can occur if the right disaster recovery technology is deployed. In the event of major system failures or hardware destructive disasters, simply fail over by switching your infrastructure to redundant production-ready images in the virtual network. Your systems are back online in minutes, enabling your business to recover and maintain its pace.