Comments on: Disaster Recovery – when to declare one?

By: lightmike

lightmike — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:57:20 +0000

Absolutely let the requirements dictate the solution as well as the activation plan. It’s business processes that need the technology. If a business process is mission critical it needs to be expressed in a tolerable amount of downtime, or response time objective (RTO). When does the disruption of the business process hurt the long term marketshare or financial viability of the organization?. If it is a really short period of time, then it is the requirement that dictates having a multi-site active cluster of services (“hot site”) that fail over without human intervention. Your question suggests you have built a “warm site” that requires a manual decision to transfer processing. This may be acceptable from a requirements (RTO) and cost-benefit standpoint (hot sites are inherently more expensive), but your business processes should dictate the number of minutes or hours you have to resume the business process that is dependent on the technology. Then you have your answer, if fixing the problem locally is estimated to be within your RTO guidelines, then fit it…If the estimated fix time exceeds the RTO, you declare and fire up the warm site.

By: kevinbeaver

kevinbeaver — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:08:32 +0000

Bottom line - How's it going to impact your business? This is why performing a business impact analysis and documenting your plans before such issues arise is so important. Here's a good resource.

By: jennymack

jennymack — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:00:02 +0000

CharlieBrowne and Meandyou,

Great, informative answers here. Thank you!

Jenny
Community Manager

By: meandyou

meandyou — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:29:20 +0000

The procedures for our D/R plan state that if the recovery time at our local site will exceed 24 hours a disaster is declared and we go offsite.

We do not have a “hot” site for d/r. We have access to other computer systems, but we have to build them from the ground up. It takes about 24 hours to do this.

Hence, if it will take longer than 24 hours to recovey at local site, we go to d/r site. We have not done this for real. But we do go offsite and rebuild critical apps twice per year.