White Paper: Five Steps To An Effective Disaster Recovery Plan

By InMage

Disaster recovery involves continuous data availability and much more. Companies that understand the key steps to ensuring smooth recovery from a disaster can choose solutions that meet today's need and tomorrow's.

Data is the lifeblood of the enterprise. Immediate access to data is the most critical element of any disaster recovery plan. Simply put, if your storage system goes down, data is lost. Even if your system is merely slow to respond with the needed data, you are out of business for that time period. Disaster recovery implies that your data must be accessible at the desired speed and integrity so your business can function normally. Therefore, in this context, your business is only as safe and as sound as your disaster recovery measures.

Many people believe it is diffi cult to construct an adequate disaster recovery plan – and in the past, they were right! It meant cataloging all of your storage devices, applications, databases and more. Then, you had to determine exactly how much data should be backed up, how often, and to what offl ine or offsite devices. Once that was determined, you were hard-pressed to fi nd a window in which to perform the entire system backup. On top of that, a daily or nightly backup did nothing to preserve the integrity and availability of data that was lost in-between time.

Today, however, there is a much better way to address disaster preparedness. The key to this innovative approach is to focus on the issue of business continuity, rather than data recovery. This white paper outlines the five steps to disaster recovery, explains each, and points to tools and advice to help you implement each step. By following these steps, you can retain your customers, your reputation, your revenues and your profi ts. By knowing what (and what not) to do before, during and after a disaster, you can prevent panic, lessen the severity of damage, and implement an organized recovery process.