Gartner’s recent research on IT Disaster recovery analysis states, roughly 80% of survey respondents reported an incident during the past two years that required an IT DR plan.

Every organization must have plans to manage an unexpected event or pay the consequences. Now, with increased need for business continuity, and technical skills to help mitigate risks, IT disaster recovery has become a top priority. This is a positive fact as businesses need continuity plans at a lower cost, and with the least resource management.

In our webinar, we will be covering this subject in detail. However, here are the three basic aspects that makes sense in building a disaster recovery plan.

Critical

What is critical to your business and how much risk your business can face? This is a fundamental question in business continuity management. However, it is driven by what’s critical and how that could change over time.

• Mission critical – Information that is critical to business that may have an immediate impact on your business

• Most Important – Information that does not cause massive impact, however not immediately unless it is taken care within an agreed period.

• Important – These are items that you’d prioritize after the above two.

• Not Important – Items you can just don’t worry during a disaster.

Severity Levels

The above provides a way to classify, whereas severity signifies the intensity to take necessary action.

• Non-Critical single app failure - You may need just one or two resource depending on their skill level to check, analyze and resolve.

• Non-Critical multiple app failure – Although this falls as non-critical, you’d need experienced engineers to help resolve.

• Critical single app or server failure – Prepare how you'd want to respond and allocate trained technical resources to resolve within a stipulated time.

• Critical multiple app or server failure – A dedicated team should be assigned to find what is causing the failure and should be able to determine how soon you could be back online.

Scenarios and Risks

Derive a brief overview of the type of disasters like fire, flood or a power outage. The idea is to have activities described to manage the event, impact and recover as quick as possible. In addition, information to perform a risk analysis will help to minimize the impact.

A disaster occurs due to infinite causes, so, focusing on causes only is a potential risk. Rather, shift your focus on outcomes and how they manifest themselves.

There are four possible outcome scenarios:

• Loss of technology

• Loss of a building Denial of access to a building

• Loss of staff/people

• Loss of supplier or a vendor

Preparing and managing the responses for these scenarios constitute an excellent disaster recovery plan, which in fact also calls for a business continuity planning. Select the utmost scenario that applies for your business, and solutions to help maximize your chances of survival.

Get help from an Azure partner

When talking about solutions, you’ll need to weigh the trade -offs first. In addition, you'd want to look for a solution that is flexible and costs less. Only a cloud-based solution could offer this. Azure backup and Azure site recovery are two powerful components of Microsoft Azure which can help in creating a disaster recovery plan.

With over 17 years of expertise and a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider, we could help you in all stages of strategy, planning and implementation, contact us.

If you'd like to learn more, register now for our upcoming webinar.