Disaster Recovery Planning: Does Everybody Have a Role?.

How to Properly Strategize Disaster Recovery Planning

A good portion of the typical day of an IT professional is looking for problem areas and taking action to ensure nothing flares up. It makes sense to put so much proactive effort into each and every day because an IT disaster can disrupt the entire enterprise. Equally as important is disaster recovery planning, because as hard as we try, some disasters can’t be stopped.

Disaster recovery planning is often approached wrong in the first place. For example, the bulk of the planning is put on mid-level IT personnel and everyone else is excluded. This is a bad approach because all departments need to be involved at some level. Even the executives, who often don’t want to be bothered with minutiae, require a seat at the table when the disaster recovery planning is underway.

The result of starting your strategy on the wrong foot is simply an incomplete and inadequate business continuity plan that will result in failure, which won’t be realized until an actual disaster takes place. Some organizations will side-step taking the necessary precautions because they believe it is too time consuming and costly to involve all departments. However, when an actual disaster occurs, they quickly realize the cost is well worth it.

When you begin your planning, establish a committee with key members from every department. Each will be assigned specific duties in the event of a disaster, and it’s imperative that each of them truly knows what is expected of them and that they are ready to react when called upon.

Once you have your committee established, you can begin working together to establish a business continuity plan that will keep your data available at crucial moments.

Of course, bringing in a cloud-based archiving solution is a smart part of any strategy. With your data backed up in the cloud, your information will be safe (especially when it is duplicated in geographically disparate data centers), even when a disaster strikes your region.

While some organizations will insist on keeping their data stored on-premise, this should be avoided. What if a water leak makes its way into the server room? What if fire breaks out and destroys the servers? What if human error results in the data on the servers being compromised? When you take your data offsite and have it backed up in geographically disparate locations, you’re protecting yourself from any number of situations that can compromise your on-site servers.

At OffSite Image Management, Inc., one of our specialties is in business continuity and disaster recovery planning. Because we work with Level IV data centers, we can ensure that our clients will always have access to their medical images, even when the worst occurs. Contact us today and let’s talk about how bringing our solutions to the table will impact your planning procedures.