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Question : Need to Interview IT Professional Regarding Disaster Recovery Planning
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Hello all,
I am currently working on a research paper regarding Disaster Recovery planning. As a part of that, I need to interview someone who has been directly involved with disaster recovery planning and implementation. I have 17 questions ready that can be completed by email. I can trim it down if necessary. An IT manager or someone else who has real world experience in this subject is what I'm looking for.
Thank you in advance!
Brad Walker
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Answer : Need to Interview IT Professional Regarding Disaster Recovery Planning
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OK, I have a few minutes.. here is my short list: :)
1. Would you consider Disaster Recovery planning to be important for businesses and why?
Absolutely. "Plan for the unexpected" is always the best way to proceed in an IT environment. Without a plan, when disaster strikes, the least you can expect is downtime for your workforce, producing 'opportunity cost' that can substantially affect the bottom line of the company. Lost revenues, customer alienation, etc., can all be traced to network downtime.
2. What types of businesses should have a Disaster Recovery plan and why?
There are no businesses that I know of that will not benefit from a DR plan. If you leverage IT for productivity, then you need to plan for disasters. The only business that does not need such planning is one that does not use IT, or server resources.
3. What types of Disaster Recovery planning and implementation have you done in your own business?
We have a written plan, use SAN storage devices (HP), and Veritas for our backups. We also use Offisite Storage of all our backups, with a plan for rotation.
4. What network related items do you consider as being mission critical to protect in your own company and for businesses in general?
Every part of the network falls under this. We have spare hardware parts, backups for our Cisco Router / Switch configuration files, and backup all data every day.
5. What could be the potential implications of a business not having a disaster recovery plan? Could you relate that to your own business?
Downtime = loss of productivity = loss of revenue = lower profits
And as stated above, this could prove fatal to customer relations in some types of networks.
6. Are there any types or sizes of businesses where a disaster recovery plan wouldnt be important? Please explain.
NO! As stated above, any business that leverages technology should have a plan.
7. In your opinion, what areas of IT must be considered in a DR plan? Please explain.
Every area of IT is important. Network infrastructure, Data, hardware, etc....
8. Who is best fit to write a DR plan and whose advice should be taken into account?
In most cases, any decent Network Admin should be able to plan for this. But, the admin must be just that, and not just a support technician that is not familiar with all aspects of the Network.
9. Has a disaster recovery plan ever been a life saver for you or anyone else that you know in the industry? If so, how did the plan help?
Oh yes. More than once. In one case it was lost data due to a SAN issue, and we had to recover via the offsite tapes. Took us 48 hours to bring it back on-line, but without a plan we may have suffered many more days of downtime, and with a user-base of 800, just the cost of users not doing their jobs would have been significant. Another was a simple DDOS attack that shut down our external lines. We had a plan for that also...
10. What disasters do you think would be the most likely to cause havoc to your businesses IT infrastructure?
Obviously the worst is data loss, for our database holds all contract information for our company. With gross revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars, this is a no-brainer. But just having our servers go down is significant. Even a NIC or a switchport that goes bad can cause real problems.
11. If a major disaster just affected your business, how do you think your businesses IT infrastructure would look now and a month from now?
Major? Like, say a fire in our NOC? For the short term, it would create havoc, but in a month, with a plan in place, we would be up and running again.
12. Would people at your company be able to work if a disaster prevented them from reaching the office and if so, how would they work?
We have Cisco Concentrators that allow VPN connections, use Citrix on top of a 2003 TS server, and all would be well. We are already prepared for something like this.
13. What technologies help you protect critical data in your business?
Backup: Veritas
Very strong firewalls
Cisco VPNs and Terminal Services (Citrix) for remote access
Internal Security Policies and 2003 ADUC Group Policy
14. Does your company spend money on DR planning and implementation and if so what percentage of the IT budget does it take?
Our IT CIO takes care of this, and is not part of my knowledge base. But, we do spend the money, and take the time.
15. Is it money well spent and would you like to see more or less spent?
What can I say? Yes. and we would always like more money for this..
16. Would you like to see the money spent elsewhere instead? Please explain.
We would always like more money in our budget. Love to have more backup servers, money for training, etc.. but sometimes it just is not there to spend.
17. What advice would you give to an IT manager who was just tasked with creating a DR plan?
Think it out first, consider every part of the network infrastructure, and do not overlook the worst case scenarios...
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