Disasters can take many shape and forms. They can be in the form of natural disasters (flood, earthquake, cyclone, etc.) man-made (terrorist attacks, thefts, arson, etc) or technical disasters (fire break-out) among others. The underlying thread common to all disasters is that they lead to tremendous amount of resource losses. Data loss in particular could be specially destabilizing for a business as they cannot hope to function normally in an extremely competiti9ve environment without important data that keeps their ball rolling. Studies as such which reveal that 80 per cent of the business cease to exist within three years of them suffering a major disaster, should not come as a surprise to us.

The seriousness and severity of the losses that major disasters can unleash warrants the need for a comprehensive disaster recovery mechanism in place. Unfortunately, disasters despite the frequency of their occurrence and the grimness of their losses are seldom taken seriously by majority of modern organizations. Organizations think that ‘disasters’ are something that will strike other organizations and not their own until the calamity strikes.

Disaster recovery (DR) as of today is more of a necessity than a choice for modern firms. Firms operating in banking and insurance sector are required by law to implement exhaustive DR policies. It, however, in no way implies that organizations operating in a different sector are allowed to show laxity when it comes to accurately assessing their risks and formulating a comprehensive business continuity plan. Each organization is different in the goods and services it offers, its scale of operations, its location, etc. and as such a ‘one size fit all’ approach with respect to DR is not going to work here. This calls for a disaster recovery mechanism that takes all this factors into account to minimize loss of mission critical data. For example, the DR plan should detail out the roles and duties of each employee in an event of the disaster and the processes that need to be followed to ensure minimum downtime.

It is important to note that in DR parlance, two terms RTO and RPO are important. Recovery point objective (RPO) refers to the maximum acceptable data loss in terms of time and Recovery time objective (RTO) specifies the time interval between an outage and service restoration. Combined together and assessed well, RTO and RPO can do a good job of helping an organization formulate a good DR plan.

In the following par graphs we shall talk in detail about some of the important disaster recovery mistakes that cost organization dearly both in the short and long term. Acquiring some knowledge about what that leads to the failure of DR plans may enable organizations to avoid expensive mistakes in future.

Lack of preparation

It would be wrong to say that organizations do not have the customary DR drill where employees practise the procedures they need to follow in event of a disaster. Having said that, it is important to note that disasters do not come following a pre-approved set of plans. No two disasters could be the same, which makes it imperative for organizations to train their employees to efficiently respond to any unforeseen event.

Lack of testing

To be successful and prove its real worth in an event of an actual disaster, a DR plan must be subjected to multiple tests to measure its efficiency. Detailing of risks scenarios are of utmost importance as it leads to a better testing and assessment of disaster recovery plans and procedures. Regular tests can help organizations identify and plug loopholes that may prove detrimental to their cause in an event of a disaster.

Insufficient participation

It is often seen that all employees of an organization are not involved in formulating and implementing the DR plan just as not all organizations think that they too can become a victim of a disaster. Inadequate participation often leads to tremendous losses as sudden decisions have to be made on the day the disaster strikes.

To combat or limit the ill-effect of a disaster, it is imperative that every stakeholder in the organization is well aware of his/her roles and responsibilities in case of an actual disaster.

Inadequate attention to backup testing

Making backup copies of their important files gives organizations the much needed peace of mind as they know that they can quickly get back their important data in an event of on-premise data loss. This assumption that you can retrieve your business data anytime and from anywhere you want, more often than not could be an invitation to trouble. It is important that you regularly test your backups to gauge the speed at which they can be retrieved without any harm coming to their integrity.