"A plan of action to recover from an unlikely event of a severe or catastrophic business disruption."
Many
common definitions exist for disaster recovery planning. Most center around
the ability to recover from a natural or man-made disaster using a combination
of redundant hardware and software or through the use of an alternate site,
however the key to a successfully disaster recovery is the plan itself.
You may have the most advanced infrastructure and employ the most highly trained people, but in the event of a disaster everything will depend on the quality of any documented procedures that you have in place, and the level of familiarity your staff have with them.
More than at any other time, during a recovery situation people, process and technology take equal importance in the smooth running of an IT department.
In a non-clustered Microsoft Exchange server environment, through application of documented and tested disaster recovery procedures it is possible to restore messaging dial tone in 90 minutes or less.
A tried and tested disaster recovery plan for Microsoft Exchange Server should address all of the following scenarios:
Recovery Storage Groups. Using native recovery storage group technology it is possible to restore an individual mailbox or even an entire mailbox store with no adverse or noticeable effect on existing service provision.
Messaging Dial Tone. Messaging dial tone allows you to restore a "basic" e-mail service, where your organisation can send and receive e-mail and has full access to an e-mail service, but does not have immediate access to legacy data.
Full System Recovery. Service has been restored to the state it was in before the disaster occurred.
Risk can be defined as Probability times Cost.
Unlikely as you may think it is that you could ever have a service failure, quantify the cost involved in lost productivity and recovery. Then decide if it's a risk you can afford.
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