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!