Disaster Recovery Planning - Mitigating Data Loss in Small and Medium Sized Businesses

Disaster recovery planning; also commonly referred to as 'business continuity planning' involves planning for the possibility of an event that causes the loss or destruction of data. It also involves ensuring that a recovery plan is in place so that the business can recover and continue should the disastrous event occur. When it comes to disaster recovery planning more than half of all small and medium-sized businesses lack a comprehensive disaster recovery plan. While almost everyone understands the need to have insurance policies to protect their assets there is often a certain disconnect when it comes to planning for the protection of the data that resides on their computer systems. After all, what good is having the insurance company buy you a new computer if the data that you need to run your business is gone? Many also focus on the word 'disaster' and assume that it refers to an act of god or some other rare occurrence and count themselves safe; after all, what are the chances that the earth is going to open up and swallow their computer systems, right? This however is badly misguided in that the 'disaster' we are referring to in the disaster recovery plan can be any of the following occurrences:

• Hard drive failure


• Operator error leading to the corruption or deletion of data


• Theft


• Sabotage by current or former employees


• Software errors leading to the corruption of data


• Flood or Fire


• Electrical damage

Now that we have established some of the many different ways that data loss events can occur we need to cover the steps that can be taken to ensure that the data can be recovered so that business operations can continue in the event that data is damaged, deleted or otherwise destroyed. One also needs to be careful not to assume that simply subscribing to one of the many online backup solutions (Carbonite, Dr. Backup, etc) amounts to a disaster recovery plan. It's worth noting that doing something is better than nothing so if you are not committed or otherwise able to develop a disaster recovery plan then an online backup system is still going to be better than nothing, but one should be careful not to develop a false sense of security since an online backup program is by no means a full disaster recovery plan. Creating a comprehensive disaster recovery plan involves the following:

1. Documenting business processes. It is important to fully document all important business processes and determine where and how the data for each is stored.


2. Planning the right backup solution. Simply running backups is often not enough- are databases involved? Most databases can't be recovered from the simple copy of files that is included in a normal backup procedure so databases need to be looked at separately and individually to ensure the backup system that is implemented is actually going to be able to recover them.


3. Implementing the backup solution. Once a backup plan is created the hardware and/or software involved needs to be acquired and set up accordingly.


4. Testing. Tests will need to be done to ensure that the backups being made work and are able to restore the data.


5. Monitoring of the backup solution. Monitoring essentially a never-ending process since there is near 100% certainty that the something will cause the backups to fail at some point and require a human intervention to get them running again.

Whether a disaster recovery plan is developed in-house or by a consultant every business needs to implement a disaster recovery plan in order to ensure their continued existence should an event occur that damages or destroys their critical data. In many cases a small or medium-sized business will not have the staff or specialization to develop a comprehensive disaster recovery plan on their own and will need to contact in an I.T. consultant to help develop one. It is important to remember that an experienced disaster recovery planning expert is just a phone call away.