It’s a rare company that is completely confident in its disaster recovery (DR) plan. DR strategy is challenging for organizations of all sizes and stripes – both from a cost perspective, and simply because it’s not easy to be aware of every possible looming threat which can result in aggravating and expensive unplanned downtime.
The fact is perfect disaster recovery architecture can seem unattainable for a number of good reasons. First, budgets can be prohibitive, given the financial and staff resources needed for effective DR planning and implementation. Unless your company has been forced to react as the victim of a disaster which caused downtime, it can be difficult to get all decision-makers on board to plan for this expense in advance.
Also, traditional DR solutions are known for headaches and complex management. This is because when it comes to protecting critical data assets, it’s virtually unheard of to have a homogenous IT environment. This leaves IT with no choice but to leverage a hodgepodge of DR solutions, each with different managerial restrictions and nuances to decipher.
Fortunately, it’s not impossible to have a solid, ultra-dependable DR strategy – as long as you know the right recipe for one. Regardless of your industry or current DR preparation level, the best DR strategies contain this trio of components:
1. Alignment Across the Business
Since DR requirements can vary dramatically from company to company, it’s critical to emphasize communication and understanding among stakeholders. Gartner notes it’s essential “DR planning is done in alignment with business continuity management (not in an IT-only vacuum).”
The truth is only some organizations can pony up the high price for top technology to safeguard their IT installation. What’s important is to be intentional about how you decide to spend whatever budget you have – connecting this spend to the level of detriment caused by downtime events. To figure that out, first think through these questions:
- What’s the total cost of a downtime event? This should include not only the financial impact throughout the company from lost revenue, but also how end users are affected by the usability impact. For example, in the healthcare industry, downtime in regard to medical treatments or emergency services may be life-threatening for patients.
- What’s the most devastating impact your organization will accept from a catastrophic downtime event? No decision-maker wants to contemplate this possibility, but unless your budget can cover any eventuality, it’s vital to really figure out your bottom line here. By knowing the size of the problem your company is willing to risk, you can target the type of technology needed to provide that level of disaster-readiness. All stakeholders should research, discuss, and agree on what’s absolutely imperative.
Once the team has thoroughly vetted these questions together, then it’s time to align expectations throughout every level of the business hierarchy. When stakeholders agree on the organization’s disaster readiness needs, it can streamline a difficult process to pave the way to identifying solutions and allocating resources.
2. Assign and Document Roles
While you’ve likely had nightmares about potential downtime scenarios, almost anything could happen which could lead to an outage – ways no one has thought of yet. This is why you need a detailed plan to guide your organization through a DR situation – and that plan should contain clear role designation.
You should never find yourself coming up with recovery protocols based on your initial response to an outage. Instead, by the time you’re responding, you should be able to turn to detailed recovery procedures. The best DR plans provide step-by-step instructions not simply one IT leader but anyone in IT can use to restore your environment.
How exactly should you frame your DR plan? The key is to create protocols based not on the downtime-causing events themselves, but on loss categories — any assets and systems such as sites, applications, third-party services, etc. which could be compromised in your environment. By basing your DR-response blueprint on loss categories, you needn’t worry about future downtime-triggering events having to fit into a limited, preconceived framework.
3. Simplified Management
Intelligent technology which leverages “smart” automation — paired with a thoroughly documented process – is the combination you need for an optimum DR strategy. The goal of this is to enable your systems to react right away when any threat or outage is detected, engaging your DR processes automatically – no muss, no fuss.
Finally, your DR management strategy should unify your environment by minimizing concurrent recovery solutions to offer the simplest, sanest user experience. For example, you don’t want IT to have to manage separate SQL Server Availability Groups on Windows and Linux. Instead, you can rely on smart high availability (HA) clustering software to take care of that. Ideally, seek a solution which can be easily layered over any mix of infrastructure to manage your entire SQL Server environment, whether different platforms, versions/editions, or distributions.
DR planning shouldn’t stop but should be approached as an ongoing evolution supported by meticulous research. You need to understand how downtime affects your company and have aligned expectations among all stakeholders about DR requirements. You also need detailed documentation on recovery steps for your company’s assets. Lastly, automated, easy-to-manage technology to support recovery efforts will have a huge positive impact on ensuring nearest-to-zero downtime. With HA clustering software which checks every box for a best-in-class DR framework, DR management can be transformed from seemingly impossible to smartly simplified.
