Common Mistakes While Planning The Disaster Recovery Plans

A company’s disaster recovery planning is a tedious process. So try not to complicate it further than it is supposed to be by trying to do too much or figuring out a way of cutting corners. Careful planning is probably you’re only bet for a successful recovery.

At the beginning of the New Year, many IT folks, perhaps even a few business managers try to resolve and take steps to avoid the interruption of events and handle the possible interruptions that can't be avoided at all. Basically, they decide on getting serious about data protection and disaster recovery Plan of the company planning for smooth operations.

Common sense about the necessity to distribute the budget, resources and time to the planning process could also be reduced by the market structure and hype around technologies such as server virtualization, data de-duplication, clouds, etc.

1. DR is not equal to high availability. For maximum companies, about 10% of workloads fall into the "always on" category.

2. All applications need not fit in one DR approach. A mutual corporate mistake in planningis to try toapply a one-size-fits-all data protection strategy. Always remember, “defense in depth."

3. Don't put in all your effort to back up everything. Expecting that all your data protection requiresbeing included in one backup process is again a common mistake. 

4. Do not overlook data that isn’t stored centrally. Forgetting about outlying data repositories is another common blunder. Not everythingis centralized in an enterprise or some complicated scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) boxes. Mission-critical data exists in branch offices, desktop PCs, laptops, tablets and, gradually, smartphones. 

5. Avoid data mismanagementand infrastructure. One more mistake DR planning novices make is ignoring root causes of disaster, which is the lack of organization of data and infrastructure. 

6. Don't duplicate equipment configurations at the recovery site. Only a subsection of applications and data need to be re-instantiated succeedinganupsetting event, you don't essentially have to design a recovery environment matching your normal production on a one-for-one basis. 

7. Remember to fortify your WAN connections. Entrusting in WANs and underestimating the negative impact they can have on recovery timeframes is one of the other rookie error.

8. Don't trust your cloud provider too much. It is not as prominent as some of the above-mentioned pitfalls, placing too much conviction in a cloud service provider to deliver disaster application hosting or post-disaster data restoration makes it to the last place on the list of potential mistakes that enterprises make while chalking the company’s disaster recovery plan. One should plan touse a cloud to host your recovery environment and make sure that it has all the jazz listed in the brochure which includes a Tier-1 data center.