With the latest “Storm of the Century” approaching the Northeast, we thought it might be a good time to post a few disaster recovery tips and lessons learned.
Hurricane Sandy hopefully helped to drive home the importance of geographically separate IT backup sites. The Huffington Post learned this lesson the hard way when Sandy hit New York City. As the storm struck, their New York City based data center flooded, bringing down their website. The IT team worked frantically to switch over to their backup site in Newark, NJ. Between New York and Newark were three separate data circuits for failover and redundancy, all three went down. The team then attempted to get the site back online in a Washington, D.C. data center, and eventually found that data replication and the re-syncing of data stores took far longer than originally planned for. What they thought would take a day or so, ended up taking a week.
Most companies test business continuity plans under very favorable conditions. They test at night when traffic is slow, or they test when key IT people aren’t stressed out. Whether it’s human or natural factors, these things add up and recovery times significantly longer than you plan for.
From TechTarget.com, here is their version of the “Essential guide to business continuity and disaster recovery plans” . The article covers business impact analyses and risk assessments, how to form an incident response plan, personnel issues and training, DR testing, change management, and BC/DR standards.
One of our partners, Agility Recovery provides business plans and resources to help businesses recover from disasters, natural or man-made. Here is a short video of how Agility helped TMone, a call center for Business Process Outsourcing in South Dakota, respond to 4 feet of snow collapsing their office on October 4th, 2013.
If you find yourself curious about the best, most cost-effective disaster recovery solution for your business – our DRaaS infographic provides a quick summary of what you need to know about cloud-based DR solutions. For more information on disaster recovery solution options, contact us here.
