We are only human. We cannot plan for everything, not everything is foreseeable, but we do learn from history do we not? In every seminar you attend for Disaster Recover or Business Continuity, you probably threw your nose up at the price offering that was mention as well. Why should we have two sets of everything? I don’t want to even pay for the one I have. For any IT department that’s treated like the companies Cancer, you know EXACTLY what I mean. This is usually the case until its too late… Disaster Recovery is one of those subjects that many technicians pay no attention to.
Disaster Recovery (or DR for short) is a plan, or policy left up to Supervisors, Managers, Directors, CIO’s and other high-ranking chiefs to create and plan for. This is in my opinion, ludicrous. DR is something you learned about in A+ class. As a Help Desk tech all the way up to the CEO or Vice President of the company, EVERYONE is involved with the planning, implementation and testing of the Disaster Recovery plan… If you have one. Let look at who is involved and why… Associate level Technicians: Well you learned about Backups did you not? A+ techs surely know about the types of backup and why they are done… that is of course disaster recovery. What about being an MCP? Surely, every MCP should know what NTBACKUP is or an ERD… what about running a repair with the boot disk set? Yes, even at the 1-2 year experience level you are working towards learning how to implement Disaster Recovery. Mid Grade Technicians:
Well you learned about backups as a junior level tech, so you must be doing them by now if you haven’t as an associate tech. Doing backups, and testing the validity of such backups is part of the DR effort. What happens when the server abends? Do you just call it quits; ride home and say tomorrow is another day? Anyone in IT knows that this is not true, Disaster Recovery is what keeps you there until 2 AM on a Friday night…. blah!
Senior Level Technicians:
So, you made it this far huh? 85 cups of coffee later you check up on how your Technicians are running backups and you are working on the project plan for rolling out all the latest hot fixes and service packs for the Business systems. You may also be involved in preparing the Server room for Backup UPS systems. Making sure you have the right Amps and current levels as well as not overloading the current circuits may be your responsibility. If you are involved with the Router and Switches for your network, you may be involved with backing up all the configurations. This is very important because if disaster strikes, you need all that information to put back into the equipment to get them running again.
Lead Level Technicians and Supervisors:
Lead Technicians should be growing into the Management role with heavy project management involvement. Leads should be looking at designing the Hot, Warm or Cold Site recovery plans. Lead’s can be involved with designing the Clustered solutions, Failover solutions and any redundancy on the network. The Seniors, Mids and Associates can be responsible for rolling out the solutions that you have tested and designed in R&D. Supervisors, whether overly technical or not need to be involved with creating the DR project plans and supervising the design rollout. The Supervisor needs to make sure that Status reports on the DR projects are handed in from all techs and a main report is generated to higher management on the status of DR implementation, testing and validity.
Upper Management: (Director, CIO’s etc)
Aaahhh, at this level you have the most responsibility. I hope that you approved the hiring of the people who can successfully do what was just listed or its you they come to asking why the E-Commerce site has been down for 2 weeks. You should be up to about 723 cups of coffee a day at this level. Make sure at this level that you allocate enough budget dollars to implement a DR project. You may also be responsible for the overall DR policy creation on paper.
Therefore, it is a growing process full of growing pains that you will be responsible for at some level of your IT experience. DR is something that happens at all levels.
In Summary:
Make sure you implement some form of DR on assets in your organization that you feel you cannot live without. Wear the Business Analyst hat and decide how much downtime you can afford. If you say something like 5 nines or 99.999% uptime required and you don’t have a DR plan, then you may want to stick the Resume out just in case…
Once you have that figure, maybe like 5 hours downtime tops, then you need to write the plan around that. You may only want a Warm Site that can be brought online within an hour or so, instead of a hot site that fails over automatically. Remember that the budget needs to be considered as well. No matter who you are in the organization, you play a very important and vital role in the companies Disaster Recovery Plan. Analyze what you do, and make sure that no matter where you are on the ladder that you strive to grow into a DR mindset. It will help you greatly in your career as you progress.
Robert J. Shimonski has numerous certifications and is a Lead Network and Security Engineer for a major manufacturing company. Robert’s specialties include network infrastructure design, security design, and network management and troubleshooting using many products including firewalls and multiple Cisco products. Robert is the author of many security-related articles and published books, including the Sniffer Network Optimization and Troubleshooting Handbook and the upcoming Security+ Study Guide and DVD Training System both from Syngress Media, Inc. Read more about Robert at his site, http://rsnetworks.net, and be sure to check out his book on using Network Associates Sniffer Solutions suite of tools: Sniffer Pro Network Optimization & Troubleshooting Handbook.
