Four Steps to a Successful DR Strategy

As often as not, disaster recovery expectations are unrealistic. Even with a well thought out Disaster Recovery (DR) plan, the ability of an organization to execute is suspect. The hope that DR can be executed to the defined RTO (Recovery-Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery-Point Objective) is often a dream rather than an expectation. The reality is that if a disaster should occur, nothing short of Herculean efforts by the IT staff would be required to have the slightest chance of getting back online in any reasonable period of time, much less the targeted RTO. But, don't give up hope. This paper provides a disaster recovery reality check and although it may be difficult to achieve, one can accomplish the DR vision by understanding four basic principles.