Disaster Recovery

As a savvy businessperson, it is very important for you to be able to plan for unexpected events to occur. Disaster Recovery is like buying insurance for your business; we all hate paying those insurance premiums but if the unexpected actually does happen to us, we are always glad that we signed up for that insurance plan!

In business, there are many more variables to take into account. Because of the wide-open nature of most business nowadays, it is more difficult to cover all of the contingencies and for this main reason it is important that any disaster recovery plan be flexible enough to be used in more than one situation. Most businesses will not get very far in trying to predict the types of disasters that might occur and indeed most businesses don't even try to do that. The best disaster recovery plans are the ones that are able to be utilized regardless of the specifics of the disaster itself.

Disaster Recovery is actually just a very small portion of a larger plan that businesses need to have. The Business Continuity Plan (BCP) covers all aspects of a business and companies that have a very detailed BCP are more likely to do better in the long run than companies that don’t think about those kinds of things.

Disaster Recovery in More Detail

So what makes a good disaster recovery plan? Well, there are a few things that are very important considerations to keep in mind when designing a disaster recovery plan. A few of these very vital considerations are discussed briefly below.

Versatility: One of the oldest jokes in the book is about the person who had a contingency plan for his own contingency plan. This may seem a little redundant, but this is one area of your business where you want redundancies. If an unexpected situation occurs that bypasses or otherwise renders ineffective your initial contingency plan, it is very important to have another contingency plan to turn to. Some owners may be loathe to spend the extra money to come up with an additional contingency plan, but remember the insurance comparison from the start of this article; contingencies are either annoying or a Godsend depending on what happens to you.

Flexibility: If you are determined to only have one disaster recovery plan, then it needs to be flexible. Recovering data and other potential losses in the event of a disaster is something that all businesses think about, but only a truly flexible disaster recovery plan, with no disaster specific (i.e. planning for a specific disaster) contingencies in place, will be able to truly expect the unexpected and act accordingly. These types of plans are extremely difficult to create, which is why the versatility of multiple contingency disaster recovery plans is more desirable.

Final Remarks

However you decide to go about doing disaster recovery, be sure that you understand what it is you want to recover in the event of a disaster taking place and make sure that your plan is complete in that regard.