Backup And Recovery Essay

The consequences of leaving all their information in one location can be catastrophic to the company’s operation and integrity as valued by their clients. Remotely storing vital information should be the first precaution taken when installing an archive full of fragile data. NAS (network attached storage), typically used in the form of cloud or RAID devices provides a safe approach to storing company information. “Common uses are central file storage, media streaming, print serving and backup for all the local drives on your network. You can even access most NAS drives from the Internet if desired.” (How to Buy Network-Attached Storage Drives, Becky Waring). If the NAS devices aren’t sufficient, file servers can support up to 25 users simultaneously and meet the high demands of the usage that typically come with a large network.

Every business, from well-established organizations such as Microsoft to the small home based business that operates out of a basement is bound to experience operational setbacks from time to time. These setbacks can be both positive and negative interruptions of normal business flow. For example, an organization might experience a demand for a product at a rate not originally anticipated, generating more revenue than expected, but leaving the organization struggling to avoid back order. Organizations might find themselves victims of theft, or sabotage, and of course no organization is impervious to the consequences of operating in the natural world. Fires, floods, storms, power outages, and other variables beyond the control of the organization have the ability to bring an entire company to a halt.

Developing backup procedures, implementing company-wide, recovery plans need to be developed and offsite backup locations should also be considered

* Backups – Did not see a backup plan. Ensure backups are conducted daily and the off-site copies are maintained.

Let 's go back to daily backups for an example. If you back up at night at 6:00 p.m. and the server goes down the following day at 4:00 p.m., then you 've potentially lost 22 hours of data that was created during that day. If you have no ability to recreate that data, then the data is lost.

The Policy was detailed and thorough, making it possible for employees to begin recovering data as soon as a data center becomes operational. The backup schedule was followed, resulting in no loss to proprietary data. The ability to recover data means that very little funds will need to be spent on research that has already previously been accomplished. These funds can be used to recovery other physical assets, and be put to use in developing a more robust Disaster Preparedness Plan.

Firstly, Disaster Recovery, this is a procedure that needs to be implemented in the case an accident occurs within an organisation that may result in the loss of data, for example fire/ water damage. This is when a plan needs to be applied to allow the recovery of data; an example of this could be recovering the backup files, installing new equipment and uploading the backup on the new network. For this to be effective this recovery policy relies on backups to be done regularly, otherwise recovery would not be eligible. The disaster recovery policy is highly beneficial and important as it saves not only the organisation but their money and reputation.

The business continuity & disaster recovery is written into the policy to ensure each department knows and has a plan in case of an unexpected event such as a fire, vandalism, and natural disaster that would disrupt normal business. This part of the plan also states that data administrators are the ones responsible to implement procedures for critical backup of data and how long the recovery time would be which is set by the data stewards and other stockholders.

As part of our disaster recovery plan, we have configured one of the servers as a backup that contains a complete backup of the primary server. The backup server will be configured so that if the primary server fails, then the backup server will come online, so that there will be no interruption in service. Each week we will test the backup server to ensure that all the files are readable and accessible. Then, once a month we will test the recovery plan creating a failure to make sure the backup server comes online.

In the event of disruption to the Network infrastructure, this plan describes the strategy and procedures for recovering vital information systems, records, and data.

Having a backup of data is important because if the data becomes corrupted or lost you will have it copied and stored so that you will still have it in future for if something goes wrong.

Disasters have become an inevitable part of businesses and organizations as well. They not only have a major effect on business and organizational continuity; they also result to an overhaul in organizational operational mechanisms (Awasthy, 2009). It is for this reason that many organizations and business resort to preparing business continuity plans and disaster recovery plans that will facilitate better disaster management in future. Effective disaster recovery plans are important to every business and organization (Thejendra, 2008).

As a consultant brought into an organization concerned about business continuity I would recommend to first perform a Risk Assessment Analysis and/or Business Impact Analysis (BIA). Conducting a business impact analysis will allow an organization to know the system or application’s downtime tolerance. The analysis will identify all systems and applications that can experience little to no downtime. Conducting risk assessment analysis will allow the organization to identify all the risks at the beginning and during the life of the organization, and grade the risks in terms of likelihood of occurring and seriousness of impact on the organization. Either analysis is an excellent tool and will result in the beginning creations of disaster recovery and business continuity planning. If using the BIA method a good first step is identifying the business’ most crucial systems and processes to assess what effect the outages will have on the business. All systems or applications should have a back-up location offsite to ensure business continuity. The higher the impact the more money a company should spend in order to quickly gain restoration of their business.

Owning a business can have many stressors day to day. When starting a business there is a lot of planning and preparation involved. Many small businesses are owners who have put their own money into the business and look at it as an investment. Unfortunately with all the planning that goes into starting a business, one thing is often over looked. Most of the time the “what ifs”, are not part of the planning stage. One reason for this is that people do not like to think of the bad things that could or may happen. So with all the time and planning put into starting a business why not put some extra thought into a plan B if a disaster strikes? This plan B could be a business continuity plan or a disaster recovery plan. Business continuity plans are an essential part of the modern day business. There are so many potential disasters for small businesses that could seize the production or even close the business down for good. A recent study from Gartner Inc., found that “90% of companies that experience data loss go out of business within two years. It also found that 80% of company owners have not thought about how they would keep their businesses up and running if a data disaster occurs.” According to the Association of Records Managers and Administrators, “about 60 percent of businesses that experience a major disaster such as a fire close

A large US public power provider, with millions of residential and business customers, needed to rethink its disaster recovery program. Due to budget constraints, the utility’s data recovery program had not been updated or tested for several years. Under the existing program, systems recovery could take up to 20 days—an unacceptable timeframe for a