The One Essential Guide to Disaster Recovery: How to Ensure IT and Business Continuity

Best Practices for Disaster Recovery to Ensure IT and Business Continuity

For today’s small and mid-sized businesses, the risk and effects from any unplanned outage (downtime) grow with each additional critical application, network enhancement or system upgrade. We don’t have to look back very far to see the consequences of sudden or unexpected disasters affecting the IT infrastructure of major cities and businesses of every description.

Consequently, IT managers have been—or soon will be—tasked to find ways to mitigate, eliminate or minimize as cost-effectively as possible the risks and effects of unplanned outages on the business. And, even more important, executives will want assurances that information assets—data and applications—can remain available no matter what happens.

This white paper will help you ensure business continuity and survival by leading you through three essential steps—from understanding the concepts of disaster recovery and high availability to calculating the business impact of downtime.

We will discuss in general terms the concepts of business continuity and disaster planning. We will focus primarily on specific IT strategies you can easily and affordably implement.

Before you begin reviewing the available technologies that support disaster recovery, you first must consider the business.  You need to identify which business processes are most important to keeping your organization operational.  Once you have identified the most critical business processes, work with the business units to determine their availability requirements for each process. Document the requirements in an internal SLA that specifies the availability goals for each
process and articulates the costs of not meeting the goals.

This white paper provides a basic understanding of the building blocks of IT and business continuity – from understanding the concepts of disaster recovery and information availability to calculating the business impact of downtime and selecting the right software solution. Readers can quickly match their specific optimum uptime objectives with the easiest and most cost-effective IT strategy.