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Q: What is Disaster Recovery Planning?
A: The processes within Business Continuity Management that focus upon recovery from, principally, physical disasters. It describes describes how an organization will deal with potential disasters.
Q: Ok but what does that mean in English?
A: Imagine industrial action that results in your staff not being able to reach your site - but it leaves your IT inftrastructure intact..... or your invoicing system failing... OR what if a fire were to break out at your premises....
Q: But that will never happen to me, so why should I worry about spending money creating a DR solution?
A: A large bread producer in SA was without an invoicing program for two days. In that time they merrily invoiced on excel (their spur-of-the-moment DR Plan) - only to lose hundreds of thousands of rands when it came to payment time as the large supermarket chains refused to pay "these fraudulent invoices", even though they'd been followed up with the correct invoices as soon as the invoicing worked again.
The Lesson: If that can happen to the big boys, then it can happen to you..
Q: There is no law saying I must have DR. Why should I go to the trouble when I can just backup my data to a storage device and lock it in a safe?
A: What you NEED to have in place - by 1 March 2010 according to King III legislation - is an alternate site with computers and servers set up - with data adequately replicated. Ideally it needs to be in a different area on a different water & electrical grid
Q: I dont know the first thing about DR documentation. Where do I start?
A: You would give us a call. We have the top specialists in Gauteng working on Disaster Recovery. We would do:
1. Initial threat/risk/vulnerability assessments;
2. Network and architecture assessments;
3. A Business impact analysis;
4. IT recovery plans
Q: If I have a disaster where my servers are destroyed, and my technical staff are incapacitated or worse, how would I bring my systems back up?
A: With our comprehensive DR plan, you'd supply us with the relevant technical information, and it would be put into a format that would enable anyone with the relevant technical qualifications (and access to the information - which you'd keep securely off-site) to bring an application/server back up.
Q: I don't want my systems to be down for longer than a few hours if my server crashes. Do you have any specific solutions to this?
A: We have a great product that would have your server back up and running within an hour of installation of a new server, even if hardware is dissimilar.
Q: I am afraid of losing data. Even if I back up from tapes in storage my data won't be current, if my server were to crash. Do you have a solution for this issue?
A: We have a product that ensures data is replicated every 7 minutes, and application can be back up and running within 2 hours of installing a new server. It would be replicated to the backup server / external device / DR Server.
Q: We don't have a working Business Continuity Plan, what do we do?
A: Speak to us regarding putting this plan in place.
Q: We don't know how to run a DR test, what are the steps?
A: A DR test is part of the DR solution we provide.
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