How far do you go with your DR Plan?

Do you have a DR plan? How comprehensive is that? Do you have a full DR site? Is it in sync all the time? Does it switch over automatically? Your users are trained on what to do in the case of a disaster?
How far do you go with your DR plan?

First I consider DR to be a business issue rather than an IT issue, through your partnership with the business you need to determine the right level of DR planning and that depends on how mission critical are your systems and how long can your business run without a DR system.

So whether you have backups hat are stored remotely or a fully in sync DR site that is really to be determined with the business. Don't see it as a technology issue or something IT should decide on.

This is a good question because it is not easy to determine how far one should go with DR plans.

As a minimum, you have a responsibility to run frequent backups and store them away from your production site. Beyond this you need to explain to the business the various options, how they will work, and how much would they cost .. the business is to decide which one to pick.

Your main options are:
- Some sort of a reciprocal arrangement with a company that uses similar systems, so you use each other's site as your DR site. This way both companies get some from of a limited DR without additional hardware cost. The difficultly here is in pulling together some sort of an agreement and overcoming issues to do with security etc..
- Sign an agreement with a hosting service provider to use their hardware in case of a disaster. This is usually easy and involves little preparations.
- Build your own DR site which comes with a myriad of complexities and costs but when done well would be the ultimate solution.

But most importantly, you need to plan of action, what will everyone do in case of a disaster, who will recover the data, who will switch the users, are the users fully aware of the procedure .. etc..

If always felt that it is hard to justify and full DR site unless you are in some really mission critical business like a bank or a stock exchange.

There are much cheaper way to have a workable DR plan without having a full DR site.

In my mind the expression disaster recovery and all it carries in terms of technology and business processes is an excellent example of how we CIOs continue to be more technology oriented than business oriented.

We should not be talking about disaster recovery we should be PART OF the organization's business continuity plan.

A disaster recovery plan on its own is no good, what is more sensible is that IT should play a major role in creating a business continuity plan for the enterprise. Needless to say that business continuity entails many many things beyond the IT systems and networks.

We should change our terminology and philosophy in order to move to become part of the leadership team, otherwise we will remain as techies.

I would say the business has to determine its needs in terms of dealing with emergencies .. that should be your guiding light in terms of what you need to do with DR.

I don't think IT should decide on its own or try to convince the business that investing in a DR site is a great idea.

If the business needs to be resilient then IT must be as well .. otherwise just make the business aware of the risk and let them decide what they need you to do.