Does your company have a disaster recovery plan?

Protecting your company`s intellectual capital and having a disaster recovery plan (DRP) are critical to the success of your business.

Where enterprise information is vital to your company`s revenue stream, it needs to be readily accessible to your employees, customers and suppliers worldwide and at the same time, have the necessary safety and backup measures for its protection. In spite of all the precautions one implements, it would be na"ive to think that failures don`t occur - they do and they will!

Your company should urgently consider implementing a DRP that will minimise any failure of its systems and that will enable the environment to become operational again as soon as possible, by backing up the environment regularly to protect your data from the various types of failures. This is critical for the recovery of your system and the task of validating and testing your backups frequently cannot be over-emphasised.

Presuming that a backup exists is a dangerous assumption and could prove very costly. What impact has system downtime have on your business? Can you justify the cost of downtime and the loss of data against the cost of reducing downtime and minimising data loss with an effective data recovery solution?

Backup and recovery planning is not a two-month project, nor is it a project that you can forget about once it is implemented. An effective recovery plan is a live recovery plan. The plan must be maintained and kept current and tested regularly.

* Define your business requirements;

* Define operational requirements;

* Test the backup and recovery plan;

* Obtain management buy-in;

* Identify the components of a DRP;

* Minimise data loss; and

* Reduce/minimise downtime.

You need to perform a through analysis of your company`s operational, technical and business requirements to provide an effective backup strategy:

* How much data pertinent does your company have?

* Do you have the hardware requirements and capacity to support backups?

* Can your data be easily recreated?

* Can you reload your data, for example from flat files?

* Does your environment configuration support resiliency to different types of failures?

Backup and recovery are always affected by business operations, especially where data must be available 24x7.

It is important that you obtain agreement and buy-in from all levels of management within your company during the defining process:

* Does management understand the trade off involved in their expectations of system availability?

* Does management understand the importance of performing backups and defining recovery procedures?

* Is management willing to dedicate the resources (personnel, hardware and finances) to ensure a successful backup and recovery strategy?

Data recovery is only as good as the backups that are available:

* Can you depend on your company`s DBAs, system administrators, vendors, backup DBAs, etc when requiring help?

* Can your backup and recovery strategies be tested at frequently scheduled intervals?

* Are your backup copies stored off-site?

* Is your plan well documented and maintained?

With data growing and services proliferating, companies are realising the necessity to invest in a comprehensive and scalable backup and recovery system.

Your system must provide recovery, reliability and performance; therefore it follows that your company is certain that you can restore your company`s mission critical data from your backup at a moment`s notice in the shortest possible time frame, with the desired results and complete integrity.

With the increase in data volumes, the lack of experienced DBAs and the need to balance cost with recoverability, finding reliable database recovery solutions is critical to the future of your business.

Disaster recovery solutions are all about critical business systems uptime. You want a turnkey solution that allows you to keep your core business processes up-and-running in the event of a disaster.

Contact Rodney Naidoo from IOCORE on (011) 790-2000 for a full evaluation of your disaster recovery process.