Taking sufficient preventative measures will help your business to reduce risks and associated costs of down time. Realistically, though, it is not possible to develop sufficient preventative security and safety measures to prevent 100% of all possible disasters. Being prepared for the unexpected is the single most critical factor. Being prepared means having plans in place that will allow you to return to normal business within a short period of time. The time has to be short enough for your type of business to be back up and running before any outage can cause any significant or devastating damage to your business.

Looking At Scenarios

To build an affective disaster recovery strategy, ROG will first identify all areas and components of your business that may be impacted, disrupted, or destroyed. It is important to keep in mind that there are many different types of disasters, each of which will end in a different scenario. Different components may need to be recovered in different time frames. To master this unpredictable situation, ROG organizes the disaster recovery planning in a modular way and clearly defines schedules and priorities for all tasks that may become necessary.

You will be ready to recover

Disaster recovery procedures and plans need to be complete and correct at all times. To achieve this, the planning has to include every single entity that is critical to do business, for example, every single servers, routers, storage arrays, but also telephones, telephone lines and non IT items that need to be accounted for. In addition, you need to be prepared to work with reduced resources because in the event of a disaster you may have fewer people and equipment available than during regular times. A continuous review of your disaster recovery plans will make sure that all plans are up-to-date.

Recovery Plans That Will Work

ROG believes there is only one true way to make sure that your disaster recovery plans will work in a real life disaster situation: A real life test on a regular basis. ROG recommends performing such tests in two steps. The first step is a simulation. Systems do not need to be shut down, but you merely simulate the different steps to make sure you have included entities and actions. If your simulation was successful you can move on to the real life test: Bringing down all system and telling the teams to get everything back up and running as planned.

ROG brings over 20 years of experience to your disaster management team. Our experience includes planning and preparing for disaster management and testing such plans on a regular basis so when a real disaster strikes you can be confident that these plans will really work.

Besides our disaster management expertise, you can benefit from our experience with relocating data centers. The tasks required to successfully relocate a data center without interruption of the daily work requires many of the same tasks that are required during the recovery from a disaster. Relocating a data center requires tasks including setting up a full hardware environment, restoring all data in the new location, moving staff to the new location and switching networks over. Combining the experience in disaster management and data center relocation allows us to provide disaster management solutions that work in a real life disaster situation. Following are the key areas of disaster management.

Initial Effort

• Define mission critical applications (if not done before)
• Define disaster management team
• Build disaster management control center / command center
• Define several teams (for example hardware, network, data)
• Define escalation plan
• Define evacuation Sites
• Define recovery plan
• Create checklist for permanent control

Continuous Effort

• Check mission critical applications (if not done before)
• Check disaster management team
• Check disaster management control center / command center
• Check several teams (for example hardware, network, data)
• Check escalation plan
• Check evacuation Sites
• Check recovery plan
• Check checklist for permanent control

During a Disaster

• Coordinate teams
• Coordinate actions of every team
• React on positive or negative situations
• Inform management, press, etc.
• Organize milestone meetings