Disaster Recovery

Are you prepared for a Disaster?

This it the most important question you need to ask yourself when you are looking at Business Continuity Planning. There are a number of ways of accessing this and one of them is to fill out a simple questionaire, as show below:

Management Questionaire:

1. Do you have a written Business Continuity Plan?
2. If so, have you fully tested it?
3. If yes, did you pass your test?
4. Have you quantified and ranked the business and financial risk of outages to all vital functions?
5. Are Business Continuity plans kept current and updated for business changes?
6. Do you perform backups faithfully and include every server and hard disk?
7. Do you regularly send your backups to a safe, offsite location?
8. Have you standardised on a proven media, drive, software, and automation backup solution?
9. Does Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery readiness have support of top management in your organisation.
10. What Recovery Time Objective’s and Recover Point Objective’s does your company require?

Computer Management Questionaire: – Backup and Recovery Best Practice

1. Do you backup your data regularly and include every server and hard disk?
2.  Does your current backup and recovery methodology meet management’s business uptime needs?
3. Do you know if your backups are working properly?
4. Do you use backup rotations to provide a good depth of file versions?
5. Do you know how fast your data is growing?
6. Have you selected a scalable solution that supports data growth?
7. Are your backups fully automted?

Business Continuity for Disaster Recovery Best Practice:

1. Is Senior Management fully committed to disaster recovery?
2. Have you conducted a Busienss Impact Analysis to quantify and rank the financial risks of outages to all vital functions?
3. Have you taken action to mitigage known risks and single points of failure (e.g. power loss, physical access etc.)?
4. Do you have a written Business Continuity Plan that includes backup procedures?
5. Have you tested your plan using a worst case scenario (loss of facility)?
6. Did testing prove that you could meet all recovery time objectives?
7. Is your Business Continuity Plan updated regularly to keep it current with business and staffing changes?
8. Do you have an adequate budget to support your disaster recovery program?
9. Do you understand your Disaster Recovery costs, options and disaster declaration procedures?