Disaster Recovery Planning
None of us wants to think of the worst, but in technology it's a necessary evil to have contingency management plans in place. Some of you may be thinking, "Hey I'm still trying to get my Plan A in place, much less Plan B!" Yet, there's no denying that business interruption from disaster is detrimental, expensive and could strike in lots of forms including power outage, hardware or infrastructure failure, adverse weather or (sadly) even terrorist activity.
So what are your options when it comes to Disaster Recovery (DR)? At the very (very) minimum, implement offsite backup of critical data. If you interpret this as someone taking the backups home, that's not a good plan. A more reliable option is to hire a company such as Iron Mountain to pick up daily backups.
To start a disaster recovery plan, consider redundancy of systems and diversification of carriers. Ideal disaster DR involves completely mirroring (in a hot-swappable manner) your entire data center at a remote site. Third-party entities called "co-location facilities" can house your systems in space equipped with generators, battery backup, climate controls, raised flooring, diverse telco carriers, rack space, etc. Or your company may have remote offices that can be used. You rent co-lo space by the square foot and based upon rack/power and connectivity (MB) requirements. When evaluating co-lo providers, consider the site's location (power grid), physical and technical security, ease of access, redundant components, floor loading, telco carrier access, and your long term space requirements.
Travis Fasko, Manager of Network Infrastructure at Technical Consumer Products (TCP) in Aurora, OH shares his company's perspective on DR: "We thought of the worst case scenario, such as complete demolition of our building. Our highest priority would be bringing back up our most critical enterprise applications and in our case that's JD Edwards, Customer Service (telephones), and Email." TCP examined third party co-lo sites and also looked at using their West Coast facility.
Let outsiders say what they will about Cleveland, Ohio (!), but the city was recently rated in the top 3 "Lowest Natural Disaster Risk Locations." And one multi-city co-lo facility recently elected Cleveland as its "Super DR Site".
