Why You Should Be Concerned With Disaster Recovery Page 7

Implementing and Maintaining the Plan

Implementing a disaster recovery plan is not an typical project. For one thing, the plan must cover more than just the IT concerns of physical protection for servers, data, and communications. If things go wrong — very wrong — the effect on people and business processes will be equally profound. So the entire company, from executives to general employees, must be included, and often trained, in their part of a recovery plan.

When it comes to the company’s servers, no plan can be allowed to sit in the wiring closet for months (or years) without running the risk of becoming obsolete. Not only must the physical aspects of the plan (e.g., links, storage, and synchronization) be periodically tested, but also the procedures and even the assumptions of the recovery should be regularly updated.

Disaster recovery for servers and related equipment, as well as IT operations in general, must be seen as part of an enterprisewide recovery plan. Developing such a plan can be a major undertaking. Recent current events, however, demonstrate that now is a good time to find general background information and inexpensive advice from resources such as the Web and various publications.

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