Server Disaster Recovery Plans
Organizations that rely on technology to function can experience costly disruptions when their network servers fail. Recovering from a server disaster can be particularly difficult if the servers that allow for communication between technicians, administrators and other personnel are part of the failure. Server disaster recovery plans take into account such complexities to provide a rapid path to recovery.
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Significance
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Server disaster recovery plans are the component in an overall business continuity plan that focuses on an organization's technology infrastructure. The plan establishes an organization's recovery strategy and the tactics that enable the strategy. Server recovery plans seek to identify and minimize or eliminate business risks from various disaster scenarios such as natural disasters, fires or similar extreme conditions. Because technology enables many business processes, server recovery planning is essential to a business' risk management strategy.
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Features
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A server disaster recovery plan takes the form of a written document. Server recovery plan documents vary in structure, but share a core set of information. The plan states its purpose and applicability. A plan may address the recovery of only a specific subset of an organization's servers, such as a set of servers at a particular location or office, or servers that store company and customer data. Conversely, a plan may be universal in scope, covering all an organization's servers. When the scope is established, the document provides detailed information about the technology, procedures and people that will enable successful execution of the plan.
Technology
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Server disaster recovery plans specify the type, configuration and use of servers covered under the plan and the same set of information for servers and other equipment that are part of the recovery process. The plan shows diagrammatically the relations between the servers and specifies their network requirements. The plan also provides detailed information about critical or line-of-business software applications installed on each server. The technology component of a server recovery plan is unique to each business; specialty vendors and consultants offer templates and services to ensure that the technology details of a plan are accurate and adequate.
Procedures
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The interactions between servers on a network require that different kinds of servers be available at different times. That is, when network administrators bring servers back online after a network-wide outage, the administrators must bring the servers online in a particular sequence. Moreover, administrators must bring each individual server online according to prescribed steps. Server disaster recovery plans detail these procedures in order to ensure that the available recovery technology functions according to plan.
People
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Server disaster recovery plans place high importance on speed of recovery. Plans lower the time needed to recover by specifying the actions individuals, usually denoted by roles such as "email server recovery administrator" rather than by name, will take in the recovery process and the time at which they will take each action.
References
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