SAS 014 – Disaster Recovery

In this episode I talk about the importance of being prepared for a disaster that takes your primary data center offline.

  • Being prepared to keep IT systems operating during or after a disaster is critical
  • What is DR, how does it work?
    • How will you offer IT services if a fire destroys your data center?
    • Email
    • Voice
    • Business Software
      • Billing
      • Accounts Payable
      • Payroll
      • CRM
    • What servers will you use?
    • How recent will the data on them be?
    • What services and data will be available?
  • This should be driven from management as a part of business continuity
  • It should be driven by IT even if BC isn’t in place
  • Hosting
    • On premises, separate facility
      • Up front cost
      • Maintenance
      • Space
    • Data center
      • Ongoing cost
      • Maintenance
    • Cloud
  • Scope
    • What needs to be included?
      • Is restoring from nightly backups enough for some servers?
    • RPO – recovery point objective
    • RTO – recovery time objective
    • Budget
  • Testing
    • Soft failover
    • Hard failover

 

  • Final Thoughts
    • DR should be considered a critical part of every IT infrastructure, make  sure you have it, that the scope is accurate and that it works.

You can contact me by email [email protected] and twitter @sysadminshow.

Thanks for listening!