Disaster recovery is a numbers game. It’s hard to get solid statistics, but if you search online you’ll see numbers like this:

• 35% of businesses will experience an outage in a critical application
• 30% of businesses lack a disaster recovery plan
• 40, 60, or 90% of businesses lacking a disaster recovery plan fail after experiencing an outage

The way to beat those odds is to develop your disaster recovery plan by paying attention to other numbers: the numbers that matter to your business. These numbers include

• Sizing and capacity to be recovered. There are subsets of numbers here. You’ll want to know how many users you need to support in disaster recovery, because it may be cost-effective to run the business with reduced staff until the main data center is back online. You’ll need to know how big desktops and servers need to be, and how much network bandwidth they’ll require.
• Criticality ratings. Disaster recovery plans should focus on bringing the business-critical applications online first. You’ll want to carefully review all your applications to assign them a priority number.
• Sequence numbers. Applications don’t startup in a vacuum; they start up in an environment that’s prepopulated with other applications. In some cases they depend on other applications running in order to come up properly. You’ll want to discover the dependencies between your applications so you can sequence your recovery process properly.
• Recovery objectives. You’ll have multiple recovery objectives. To start, there are two categories of objectives: recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). You’ll have many more than just two objectives, though; every application, or at least every group of equally critical applications, will have its own RPO and RTO.
• Contact numbers. The numbers you need aren’t just about the technology; they’re about the people you need to execute the process. Make sure your recovery plan includes current contact information for everyone involved in bringing systems up. You’ll need to know how to contact management, IT employees, business staff, vendors, and others.
• Test schedule. This should be a number larger than zero!!! It’s important to test your disaster recovery plan at least once per year in order to make sure it’s still accurate. Any problems found during the test should be corrected to make sure the plan will work if it’s invoked for real during the year.

Do you need a help tallying up your disaster recovery numbers? Prescient Solutions offers disaster recovery services to businesses and organizations in the Chicago and Schaumburg areas. From designing a backup solution that protects all your data and implementing a recovery strategy that quickly accesses data to restore systems, our IT consulting and managed services help you meet disaster recovery challenges. Contact us to learn more about how our disaster recovery services can help you get your disaster recovery numbers under control.