Stay one step ahead of potential disasters with our disaster recovery checklist

Here are 6 key points to consider when planning for the “unpleasant”. We hope this disaster recovery checklist is helpful. . .and if and when a situation arises, you are poised to keep things “business as usual”.

1. Assess the problem and its impact on your customer(s)

Every disaster and customer is different. Before doing anything, understand the underlying issue and how it will impact your client.

• Have files been deleted or are servers / workstations down?
• Is the issue local to one machine, or does it affect your customer’s entire system?

2. Establish recovery goals

Recovery is what makes a BDR solution different from a simple backup product. Plan out your customer’s road to recovery.

• Restore the system, the data, or both? Should time be spent recovering files and folders before system recovery?
• Identify critical systems and prioritize recovery tasks.
• What date/time should you recover from?

3. Select the appropriate recovery type(s)

To get to your “road to recovery”, the appropriate recovery procedure must be followed. Think about which approach will best get you to your end goal.

• File restore.
• Local virtualization.
• Off-site virtualization.

4. Verify the recovery and confirm functionality with users

Once a recovery is verified, confirm that it interacts positively with users.

• Test network connectivity.
• Ensure all users can access resources and applications in the virtual environment.

5. Restore the original system(s), if needed

If the original system(s) needs to be restored, decide which restoration process will work best.

• Bare metal restore.
• Virtual machine restore

6. Self-assess afterwards

After it’s all said and done, take a step back and think about it: How well did your team do? What could you have done differently?

• What precipitated the failure?
• What ongoing issues need to addressed?
• What can be done better in future DR scenarios?

So, there it is–our advice for a disaster recovery checklist. We specialize is business continuity and would love to hear from you. please contact us with any thoughts or questions.