Before you invest in disaster recovery

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. Before you spend anything on disaster recovery, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

The realistic threat for most small businesses is automated and opportunistic, not targeted. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Ask how long you could be down before it really hurts
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

The mistakes we see most

That answer sets your budget. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Practise the recovery at least once a year. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

How to tell if yours is fine

The cheapest security work is the boring kind done on a schedule. Three things worth confirming about disaster recovery before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Practise the recovery at least once a year — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.