You shouldn’t need to scramble after a disaster strikes. For every minute of downtime, your business is losing revenue and damaging its reputation – which makes reactionary measures no longer sufficient for a company’s livelihood. For this reason, it’s best to approach disaster recovery (DR) from a perspective of “disaster avoidance.”
To make recovering IT systems a cinch, a proactive approach needs to take precedence. As part of this goal, a new term has emerged: IT Availability.
IT Availability recognizes the co-dependencies that business has with its technology, whereas DR views technology in a boxed perspective. When companies fall on the side of reactive attention, often there are cultural frameworks that prevent proactive resiliency. The key is to change this way of thinking.
The best way to set the right culture for refining and improving preparedness is to open a dialogue with stakeholders. With input from these individuals and/or business units, follow these important steps:
Identify your critical business processes and functions, then define the recovery requirements and map technology dependencies.
Identify risk scenarios, then determine the probability and impact of each scenario.
Develop plans that address each scenario to mitigate risks.
Test your strategy frequently and update it continuously.
—Allan Leinwand: Chief Technology Officer, ServiceNow
In addition to the four steps outlined above for proactive DR, it’s essential to constantly improve your DR strategy so that it doesn’t become outdated. One way to ensure this constant improvement is with the DRaaS availability lifecycle:
The “Business Impact Analysis” stage takes note of how lost data and compromised applications impact overall business operations and revenue generation. Synthesizing this information, IT teams work with a DRaaS provider to tier applications into groups by order of importance.
During the “Implementation and Onboarding” stage, companies select the right DRaaS solution for each tier, accounting for required service level agreements (SLAs), technology capabilities, and budget. A DRaaS provider gives advice based upon potential risk scenarios and assists in the architectural design and networking details. After the onboarding process has been completed, copies of data and applications are replicated into their chosen recovery environments for safe-keeping.
In the “Playbook Development” stage, IT teams consult with the DRaaS provider to document the order of operations for recovery, customizing steps for every scenario under the sun and noting each team member’s responsibilities. The more comprehensive the better. The DRaaS provider helps map out which operations need to occur before systems are returned to end users.
In the “DRaaS Operations” stage, the DRaaS provider focuses on the daily maintenance that ensures healthy DR environments remain healthy. This includes environment changes and resource monitoring.
Similarly, the “DRaaS Health Management” stage emphasizes real-time monitoring, but with a focus on security, budget and compliance settings.
Then comes the “Recovery Testing” stage. DR testing should be always on-demand and comprehensive. In some instances, tests should invoke your full IT team and DRaaS provider, and cut crucial members out to simulate a real-life scenario. Host pre- and post-event consultations to determine updates to the recovery playbook.
The “Playbook Development,” “DRaaS Operations,” “DRaaS Health Management” and “Recovery Testing” stages repeat themselves indefinitely, until the event of a real-life disaster, at which time the recovery process is executed in the “Recovery Event Management” stage.
InterVision performs the DRaaS Availability Lifecycle for all of its Managed DRaaS solutions, dedicated to client confidence that recovery will work when needed most.