How to increase your Disaster Recovery budget

Time and time again this point has been driven home to me, the best way to increase your DR budget is to actually experience a disaster.  Now on a very high level everyone knows that a disaster could occur in their environment but it doesn’t usually seem to hit home with some people, much in the same way smokers on some level know they could get lung cancer but they still smoke. As a network admin we can simulate failures and draw up reports and recommendations for management and sometimes that drives the point home and sometimes it doesn’t but nothing ensures you an instant DR budget increase like actually experiencing a full out “losing money by the minute” disaster.

The problem for some companies is that one disaster is all it takes to put them out of business and they never get the chance to fix their ways.

So what can we do as admin’s? Run DR model’s, simulate failures and make sure that your vulnerabilities are well documented and reported up the chain. Hopefully you get the budget you need and if you didn’t well then at least your posterior will be covered when the excrement hits the fan.