Back up and Disaster Recovery – Five Common Mistakes

Businesses are aware of the impact that a well-crafted backup and disaster recovery plan has on their organization. These plans are critical to avoid exorbitant downtime costs and to keep businesses running smoothly.

As your business grows and with regulations changing rapidly, your disaster recovery and backup plan needs to change. While no DR plan is 100% fail-safe, with careful planning you can develop one to fit your needs. The following are five common mistakes concerning back up and disaster recovery.

1. A Plan

In most cases, the IT department creates the DR plan; however, recovery is a companywide responsibility. Best practice is to work with an outside recovery partner for plan revisions. An effective DR plan includes business leaders, frontline users, legal, and those who order data and mission-critical applications.

2. People

While back up disaster and recovery contains IT equipment and data, it should also include communications, facilities and people. Employees should be trained on best practices to follow within your companies DR plan to ensure your business is up and running in no time.

3. Testing / forget to test plan regular basis

A common mistake is controlling every phase a test is performed to a set of systems. A best practice is to let management know that a test is taking place. The goal is to mimic as close to failure as possible to assure the plan is sound as if a true disaster occurred.

4. Local back up only

In this situation businesses are comforted that their back up is local. Local backup does solve the most common of data loss, accidentally deleting a folder or file – but is susceptible to natural disasters, fire and floods.

5. No contingency plan

It is a good practice to have multiple plans in case what can go wrong. To assume everything will go as you planned for backup and DR, is a big mistake. Be sure to document a process that includes what should be done if the person responsible is unavailable. Share your plan with your IT provider as well as getting an outside opinion.

It is likely that any change to your business or IT systems will directly impact your back up and disaster recovery plan. Test your plan on a regular basis and review the results from the test. Be sure to update your DR plan based on the results of your test.