Disaster Recovery Planning

Disaster Recovery Planning is required to ensure continued availability of IT and Telephony services essential to your organisation.

EvotecPlus Steps to a Comprehensive DR Planning

Step 1

Define likely disaster scenarios and resources required

Step 4

Identify the key IT and Telephony resources, ensuring there is a proxy or stand-in for each

Step 7

Document the whereabouts of this backed-up data and nominate a document owner

Step 2

For each scenario, define the critical business functions likely to be affected

Step 5

Maintain detailed IT infrastructure, Telephony infrastructure, Call Flows and Network Design documents

Step 8

Define the process for recovering back to the existing or production sites and lines post the disaster

Step 3

Understand the key inter-dependencies between critical functions and applications

Step 6

Maintain a list of each business function system and the key integration points

Step 9

Test, test and retest the Disaster Recovery Plan with all relevant personnel, you may one day depend on it!!!

Disaster recovery planning prepares an organisation to respond to an interruption of essential business functions and provides the guidelines to recover these services. A complete and tested Disaster Recovery Plan ensures the availability of infrastructure, applications, and data along with other IT and Telephony resources to perform all required actions

Do I need a Backup, a Failover or a Disaster Recovery Plan

Data Backup

Data backup is exactly what it sounds like. Essentially, you are saving copies of your data at a certain date and time which could range from a few hours ago to a few days ago, depending on the specific organisation's practice. It is important to have a data backup solution in place, but it cannot be an isolate solution.

A Failover

A failover is like a spare tire. When you get a flat tire, you switch to the spare and keep going. Some spares are only meant to get you to the nearest tire shop, but others are the same as the original tire. In the IT and Telephony world, that generally means there is a computer ready to run your mission critical programs or a phone carrier ready to take or reroute critical calls, simply allowing you to switch to that computer or carrier when your system goes down and you can continue to work until the original system can be fixed or restored. Failover importance is, it helps preserve business continuity while the problem is being fixed.

Disaster Recovery

Disaster Recovery is the big one. It encompasses all ideas under one large umbrella that keeps systems working with little downtime while also providing a backup and recovery plan for when disasters strike. Disaster recovery outlines the procedures that happen when something takes down your system, whether it, sthe whole thing or a small piece. It is essentially the handbook of steps to recovering lost data during an outage, having a back-up carrier, restoring the systems and services, and getting everything back on track. This might include replacement pieces of physical hardware, backup solutions backup sites, data integrity checks, failover carriers and more