After dealing with the immediate impact of a
disaster, you must start the process of moving forward. This
usually begins about a day after the emergency occurs, but it could
be much later in the case of major disasters.

During this pivotal time, you face two major,
and simultaneous, projects. First, you must continue your efforts
to restore services to your end users. Second, you must begin
planning how to bring operations back to normal.

The continuation of service is your primary
concern. After you’ve completed emergency restoration operations,
you’ll typically need to bring several more systems back
online.

These are usually the company’s semi-critical
systems–important to continued business, but not so critical that
they need to be back up immediately. Common examples include file
servers used for archival purposes and secondary databases used for
reporting and other purposes.

Even if these systems can afford to be offline
for a few days, you must get these servers up and running
eventually, and therefore you need to plan your next steps.

Organizations generally don’t protect these
servers with real-time replication and failover systems, since the
recovery point objectives (RPO) for these servers typically allow
for the loss of a day’s worth of data or more. So if you don’t
already have standby systems in place, you must first obtain the
necessary hardware and software to restore the servers.

After restoring the platforms, find the latest
backup tapes available (again assuming that you’re not using some
other form of data protection), and restore the data to the new
servers, making adjustments as necessary along the way to deal with
configuration issues.

In addition, you need to start restoring data
protection services for the data generated in the DR systems.
Therefore, in the (hopefully) unlikely event of a problem at the DR
data center, you won’t lose newly created data while you’re in a
failover state.

Meanwhile, you should begin to determine if and
when you can return to your production facilities and data
systems–depending on the depth of the outages. You need to find
ways to bring the old and new data back to the original systems,
and you should make preparations for getting your end users back to
their normal lives.

At this early stage, keep in mind that it may
very well be impossible to begin restoration efforts, but you must
still begin preparing for that time. While you may not be able to
act at this juncture, you must begin to plan now so you can
successfully complete restoration at the nearest available
time.

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