Network Disaster Recovery (part 1)

Network Disaster Recovery

Part 1 - Overview An Article by your Guide Bradley Mitchell

IT professionals have recognized the importance of disaster recovery for decades. Both the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and recent IT technology trends have led to more widespread awareness of disaster recovery and other business continuity issues. Organizations face some tough choices, though, in planning for the future.

What Is Disaster Recovery? In IT, disaster recovery involves a series of actions to be taken in the event of major unplanned outages to minimize their adverse effects. Disasters can result from events such as hacker attacks computer viruses electric power failures underground cable cuts or failures fire, flood, earthquake, and other natural disasters at a facility mistakes in system administration The related concept of business continuity involves insuring that an organization's critical business processes, including those utilizing IT systems, can be maintained in the event of a disaster. Why Is Disaster Recovery Important? When executed well, disaster recovery procedures save large sums of money. Disaster recovery can also improve the quality of human life, and it may even save lives. The terrorist attacks of 11 September, for example, caused large-scale network outages. Among the affected systems were some of the fiber optic telecommunications services provided by Verizon. Besides the financial impact to Wall Street firms from lost data connectivity, the loss of voice contact with friends and family greatly affected many individuals on that day. Disaster Recovery Planning The best approach to disaster recovery focuses primarily on planning and prevention. While the damage resulting from the events of 11 September could not have been anticipated, many other more typical disaster scenarios can be analyzed in detail. For those events that can't be prevented, an IT disaster recovery plan takes into account the need to detect the outages or other disaster effects as quickly as possible notify any affected parties so that they can take action isolate the affected systems so that damage cannot spread repair the critical affected systems so that operations can be resumed