Disaster Recovery & Why You Need It

Disaster recovery covers businesses in the event of a hardware failure or disasterous situation. You need to plan for these events in case of an unexpected emergency where your data has been lost or stolen.

In business, there are many more variables to take into account. Because of the wide-open nature of most business nowadays, it is more difficult to cover all of the contingencies and for this main reason it is important that any disaster recovery plan be flexible enough to be used in more than one situation. Most businesses will not get very far in trying to predict the types of disasters that might occur and indeed most businesses don't even try to do that. The best disaster recovery plans are the ones that are able to be utilized regardless of the specifics of the disaster itself.

Disaster Recovery is actually just a very small portion of a larger plan that businesses need to have. A business contingency plan covters all aspects of a particular business and with a detailed contingency plan, your business is more likely to perform better in the long-term, than companies that have no disaster contingency plan.

Disaster Recovery in More Detail

So what makes a good disaster recovery plan? There are many important things to consider when creating a disaster recovery plan. Some of these vital thoughts are detailed below.

Versatility: One of the oldest jokes in the book is about the person who had a contingency plan for his own contingency plan. Although it may appear to be slightly redundant, this is one area where you business should have redundancy. If an unexpected situation occurs that bypasses or otherwise renders ineffective your initial contingency plan, it is very important to have another contingency plan to turn to. Some owners may be loathe to spend the extra money to come up with an additional contingency plan, but remember the insurance comparison from the start of this article; contingencies are either annoying or a Godsend depending on what happens to you.

Flexibility: If you are determined to only have one disaster recovery plan, then it needs to be flexible. All businesses consider the potential loss and recovery of data in the event of a disaster, but only a very flexible disaster recovery plan, with no specific disaster (i.e. organising for a particular disaster) backup procedures in place, will be ready for the unexpected and act according to the situation. Disaster recovery plans can be difficult to create, this is why it is often preferred to have multiple disaster plans for extra resillience.

Final Remarks

However you decide to go about doing disaster recovery, be sure that you understand what it is you want to recover in the event of a disaster taking place and make sure that your plan is complete in that regard.