Disaster recovery mistakes: what can go wrong and how to fix it

Cloud computing disasters can be big or small – from a brief disruption to an all-out shutdown. But whatever the size, they spell stress, time and money for your firm.

• Stress, because day-to-day operations become a chore. Deadlines are missed. Tensions are frayed.
• Time, because no disaster will fix itself.
• And money, because the time and energy spent rescuing your workloads means a loss of productivity.

There's no two ways about it. If your system goes down, you go down with it. The question is for how long and how serious the repercussions are.

Tell this to many business leaders and they point with satisfaction to their disaster recovery plan. But more often than not, this plan may as well be written in runes and locked in the furthest reaches of the basement. No one can remember what it says or how to execute it when disaster strikes.

Then there's the question of whether your plan is up to snuff. Even if you do have a disaster recovery plan in place and you know it inside out, it could still cause you problems when you break the emergency glass.

And plan or no plan, it won't stop the disaster from happening in the first place. To minimise the risk, you need to take practical steps here and now.

That's why we've put together this guide to common disaster recovery mistakes – and how to fix them.

1. You don't have a disaster recovery plan

This is more common than you might think. Without a solid disaster recovery plan ready to go, you're creating problems for yourself down the line.

The key is to be proactive, not reactive. Know the challenges that your business could face and you're better placed to face them. The alternative is to execute a recovery operation on the hoof, with all the stress and wasted time that entails.

A disaster recovery plan can be made internally by IT (with input from other departments) or you could harness the expertise of a cloud consultancy firm. This second option brings a second pair of eyes to bear on your processes and systems.

2. You haven't tested your plan

Think of your disaster recovery plan as being like your evacuation process in the event of a fire. People will only know what to do if you drill it regularly.

We get it: time is tight. But for IT to be able to execute a disaster recovery plan, they need to be able to simulate it.

These simulations do double duty. As well as drilling the procedure, a walk-through or tabletop exercise helps you spot flaws in the plan. Better to remedy them now than clock them when you're in the midst of a rescue operation.

3. Your backups aren't joined up

No DR plan is complete without a strategy for backing up data. But you should also back up your backups.

Businesses have never had to deal with so much data. For this reason alone, your disaster recovery plan needs to thoroughly account for all your data: client data, employee data, performance data – the list goes on.