For Best Results, Prepare for the Worst

In the event of a disaster, is your business prepared? If your office's sprinkler system goes off in your server room, jeopardizing all the data on your server, or if your main office is lost in a fire, does your business have the tools it needs to get back up and running?

When it comes to your company's information technology needs, being prepared means being able to recover from a disaster effectively and rapidly. Without a focus on disaster preparedness, your company—and its reputation—could be at risk. Preparing for the worst ensures the continuity of your business in the face of a disaster scenario.

Getting Started

The first step in IT disaster preparedness is determining what it is that you need to protect. Identify, locate and segment the different types of electronic data within your firm; some examples might be your company's accounting data (time and billing software, records, etc.), line-of-business applications, employees' general documents (word processing, spreadsheets, presentation files), email server and web server.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• How, and how frequently, are your data sources backed up?
• Where are these backups kept?
• If, in a disaster, you were able to access these backed-up files, how long would it take to recreate these systems for your business?

Then, pinpoint your company's tolerance for data loss with regard to each of the data sources you have identified.

Determining Your Tolerance

For each data source that needs protecting, you must answer the following two questions:

1) How much data are you willing to lose?
and
2) How long can you wait to get that data source up and running?

If your company completes a full tape backup of its web server every night, it is putting up to 24 hours-worth of the latest data at risk. Can your firm afford to lose 24 hours of data updates? If this data can be easily re-created, perhaps this amount of risk is acceptable for your business. If it cannot; for example, if your business relies on e-commerce, consider investing in a method by which the data would be backed up more frequently.

Imagine that your company's email server just crashed, and that you have a full backup of that server every night via tape. Even if you immediately order a new server and have it shipped overnight, it would likely take two to three days to set it up for use, and another day to restore all the data from tape. Your company would be looking at about four business days before any of your employees would be able to send or receive email. Is that an acceptable amount of risk for your business? If not, again, your firm will have to determine what amount of risk is appropriate and consider investing in a better solution.

The bottom line, of course, is that the less data your company can afford to lose, and the less time it is willing to be down, the more money it will cost to be prepared for a disaster.

Designing Solutions

Once you have evaluated your company's risk tolerance with regard to each data source, we recommend you identify at least two possible solutions per source, at different cost levels, in order to determine the solution that is most viable for your organization.

For example, an inexpensive solution for email redundancy might be to use an email and spam filtering service like MailWise, and pay an extra couple hundred dollars each month to have emergency access to your emails should you need it.

A slightly more expensive option might be to have a continuous backup of your company's email server using a backup system like Optimal's dataGuard^sm service, which could readily create a temporary virtualized server that will function until you get your server repaired.

The most expensive solution would be to create a fully redundant, live, clustered email server in an offsite office. This server would be ready to go the instant your primary email server went down.

Last Word

Our hope is that this article has got you thinking about what effective "disaster preparedness" means for your business. We've outlined only a few considerations here, but comprehensive preparation for disaster involves the creation of a complete business continuity plan—a plan that would serve as the blueprint to getting operational in the wake of the unthinkable. Your IT administrator or service provider should be your partner in creating this plan. If you don't currently have a plan in place, it's a discussion you may want to have soon. Because in the world of IT, it's best to be prepared for the worst.

If you have questions regarding any of the information contained within this article, or would like Optimal Networks to assist you in your disaster recovery planning (from an IT perspective, of course), please contact us at 240-499-7900 or e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

REALITY CHECK They were prepared—are you? Our client, a law firm employing more than 50 people, had just scheduled a server replacement project. One week prior to the project, the server went down ñ one of its hard drives had failed completely and couldn't be fixed. The incapacitated server acted as a repository for all of the firm's documents; without this server, firm employees could not access any business critical documents and were, essentially, closed for business. Thankfully, as part of its disaster preparation strategy, the firm had purchased dataGuardsm, a complete backup and disaster recovery service. This made it possible for us to quickly virtualize the server using the latest server backup. This meant a faster return to operability and productivity. Instead of waiting 2-4 days for a new server, the firm was up and running in just a few hours. Plus, our engineers could focus on proactively planning for the new server installation, instead of having to shift timelines and react to an IT crisis. An engineer on the job summed it up best: "You can't prevent disasters, but you can prepare for them."

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