In this episode I talk about the importance of being prepared for a disaster that takes your primary data center offline.

• Being prepared to keep IT systems operating during or after a disaster is critical
• What is DR, how does it work?
  • How will you offer IT services if a fire destroys your data center?
  • Email
  • Voice
  • Business Software
    • Billing
    • Accounts Payable
    • Payroll
    • CRM
  • What servers will you use?
  • How recent will the data on them be?
  • What services and data will be available?
• This should be driven from management as a part of business continuity
• It should be driven by IT even if BC isn’t in place
• Hosting
  • On premises, separate facility
    • Up front cost
    • Maintenance
    • Space
  • Data center
    • Ongoing cost
    • Maintenance
  • Cloud
• Scope
  • What needs to be included?
    • Is restoring from nightly backups enough for some servers?
  • RPO – recovery point objective
  • RTO – recovery time objective
  • Budget
• Testing
  • Soft failover
  • Hard failover

• Final Thoughts
  • DR should be considered a critical part of every IT infrastructure, make sure you have it, that the scope is accurate and that it works.

You can contact me by email [email protected] and twitter @sysadminshow.

Thanks for listening!