What Is Your Disaster Recovery Plan?

Having a Disaster Recovery Plan can make a difference between a business continuing and a complete crash and burn.

Don’t be caught out before it is too late,so what is your disaster recovery plan? All businesses and even those with computers in the home should be prepared for failure. A disaster could appear in many forms such as accidental damage, theft, flood, or fire.

In the IT industry coming across this situation is all too familiar. Unfortunately, companies are usually trying to recover from a disaster when it is often too late.

Hamilton Group always lays out questions to find out a company or individual’s disaster recovery plan.

Our primary question is always ask “What is your disaster recovery plan”.

Let us go into this in more detail and some details about a case we dealt with recently.

Scenario – changed name Ltd

Due to keeping our client’s respect, we changed the name. However, the details are accurate. We received a call quite early in the morning,

now this was strange as we had received about seven missed calls from a number none of us recognised.

The details that follow are quite emotional for us but it went as follows:

“Hello, Hamilton Group how can I help?”,

I answered as best I could but this call was around 7 am and a pre-morning cup of tea to wake us up.

“Hi, can you help we had a burglary last night and our server was stolen and our regular IT firm Joe Bloggs Ltd is unable to restore our backups”

I have removed actual company names but it transpired that they had been backing up the server, but had not carried out test restores so had no way of knowing the best way to restore the data.

After quickly responding and asking what is your disaster recovery plan, it became obvious they didn’t have one.

We worked out the best way how to get them up and running with minimal downtime, we put together plans to make it so if this ever was to happen again we can get them up and be running again within the hour, even if temporarily.

Do you store local backups?

Great if you do, we can at least make it easier to be up and running again but a local backup may be useless against a flood or a fire.

Remember store it locally if your machine is damaged or stolen your backups may be too.