Even under optimal conditions and thorough disaster recovery (DR) planning, the possibility always exists that your disaster recovery strategy can go wrong.
How disaster recovery can go wrong
The steps you have taken to ensure your organization stays operational when disaster strikes can go awry for reasons including:
- A lack of planning – despite including every last recovery detail, process and contingency in your DR strategy, if your plan does not make provision for specific scenarios with their corresponding DR steps, thing can go south quickly.
- A lack of testing – Without testing your DR plan, it’s not worth the paper it’s written on. A practical example: if you plan on recovering to the cloud testing your recovery in the cloud should not be your only test. You should also test your operations in a failover state and failback.
- Not being prepared – we concede that there may be a disaster scenario that you simply cannot prepare for but having specific plans for specific disaster scenarios can mitigate this risk.
To ensure your DR plan does not let you down when disaster strikes, avoid these 3 mistakes:
- Relying on infrequent backups
Backups are an integral part of a DR plan. The mistake is relying on only one backup – one backup means one point of failure. Most organizations back up certain data separately, for example, client data and employee data. You DR plan must therefore account for all the places where your data is stored.
- Forgetting to Update as Systems Change
Your organization’s technology will change over time and you will probably not use the same devices or software in 5 years as you do now. Despite this knowledge, this is one of the most common DR planning failures: failing to update your DR plan as your systems and software change. Re-evaluating your DR plan is essential whenever you make major changes.
- Not communicating the DR plan properly
This is another one of the frequent DR planning mistakes – IT only knows about the plan. Ideally, and to avoid panic amongst employees, customers and IT when disaster strikes, IT should communicate the DR plan clearly to all stakeholders explaining what to expect and explicitly laying out the timeline of which systems should come online first.
Deploying a robust disaster recovery solution has never been easier. Stage2Data’s cloud Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) is simple, reliable and all-inclusive. To learn how Stage2Data’s cloud DRaaS solution can help your business avoid these mistakes, get in touch today.
