Today’s corporate IT systems have never been more vital or faced so many threats. In today’s blog, we’ll explore four essential IT disaster recovery (IT/DR) best practices every organization should follow to ensure that, in the event of an outage, it can restore its information systems promptly and completely.
Understanding the Stakes: Why IT/DR is Critical
Businesses depend on their IT systems, and IT systems depend on effective IT/DR in order to swiftly recover from outages—and avoid the consequent impacts to their organizations’ operations, reputation, and bottom line.
Meanwhile, today’s intense threat landscape means the impact of of outages is higher than ever.
The issues described in this blog are ones we encounter week in and week out in our work with MHA clients. Organizations that follow the best practices described below tend to bounce back quickly. Those that do not typically experience slow, difficult, and expensive recoveries.
Four Essential IT/DR Best Practices
Here are four key IT/DR best practices to help ensure your organization’s system can be speedily and fully restored in the event of an outage.
Make a prioritized list of everything running in the environment.
The most important step any organization can take to ensure that its IT systems can be restored swiftly and fully is having a prioritized inventory of everything running in the environment. The list has to be comprehensive, including not just business processes but also apps, middleware, monitoring tools, security tools, and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. Completeness is important because in a DR event, outages of seemingly minor systems can and often do cause significant delays. The items should also be prioritized based on which are the most critically time sensitive. Ideally, prioritization will be determined through a business impact analysis (BIA), but a back-of-the-envelope ranking by a few knowledgeable people can go a long way toward providing rational guidance for your recovery strategy. This ranking should identify which services, by their absence, will cause the most damage to the organization. This comprehensive, prioritized list, which should be reviewed and updated regularly, is the foundation upon which your recovery plans and strategies will be built.
Make sure you have the technology necessary to recover every item on your list.
This best practice, along with best practice No. 1, will get you 80 percent of the way to where you want to be. You have to make sure you have in place all the technology needed to fully restore everything in your environment. Your items don’t necessarily need to be in a highly available or failover state, but they should be recoverable in some form or fashion. Recovery from a backup is fine, provided it meets the business RTO (recovery time objective). The key is to make sure you have enough capacity to effect the recovery. Also, don’t overlook the lower-level items. While recovery priorities are based on criticality, neglecting lower-level systems can result in unexpected issues, especially when dependencies are uncovered during a disaster.
Perform exercises to verify that you can truly recover.
Don’t rely on tabletop exercises alone; they are valuable but only go so far. To ensure that you can truly restore your systems, you have to perform actual recovery exercises, first at the level of individual apps and then by restoring multiple apps simultaneously. Do various types of exercises, including large-scale ones, to make sure your strategy and implementation are working. Actual recovery exercises are a powerful tool for uncovering hidden gaps. Among the issues such exercises typically uncover are overly optimistic expectations regarding how long things will take, missing configurations, issues with authentication in Active Directory, and problems with scale (for example, you might find that you can restore three or four servers at one time but when you try to restore 100, the system slows to a crawl or crashes). The time to uncover these gaps is before an event when you have time to close them. The price for learning about them during an event can be steep.
Provide an appropriate level of documentation.
Your DR plan should provide enough information so that a competent professional not already intimately familiar with your system can follow it to successfully effect a recovery. If a plan is overstuffed it becomes difficult to use. If it leaves out key information (e.g., information that is unique to your implementation), it is effectively useless. The plan should communicate the order of operations, indicating what apps you’re going to recover along with their servers and databases.
Bounce Back Strong
Robust disaster recovery planning isn’t just a technical necessity—it’s a business imperative that can mean the difference between a swift recovery and a prolonged crisis. By implementing these best practices, you’re not only protecting your IT systems but also safeguarding your organization’s reputation and bottom line.
Proactive preparation today paves the way for resilience tomorrow. Review your IT/DR strategy regularly and stay ahead of emerging threats to ensure your business can always bounce back strong.
Take Charge of Your Recovery
With over two decades of experience as a leading consultancy, MHA has partnered with organizations worldwide—from Fortune 100 companies to government agencies and nonprofits—to build resilient IT/DR strategies that work. Our expertise spans a wide range of industries, ensuring that no matter the challenge, we have the insight and capability to help you recover quickly from IT disruptions.
If you’re ready to ensure your organization is fully equipped to bounce back from an IT interruption, get in touch with our team today. Let MHA guide you in transforming your disaster recovery plan into a robust, proactive strategy that safeguards your business continuity and reputation.
Further Reading
- Let’s Get Real: The Limitations of Tabletop Recovery Exercises
- The Science and Art of Writing an IT/DR Recovery Plan
- Who Does What: The Most Critical Job Roles in IT Disaster Recovery
- Spread Your Wings: There’s More to BC Drills Than Tabletop Exercises
- Protecting Your Business: MHA's Best Practices for IT Recovery and Resiliency
