Disaster Recovery Planning

Solve-IT Newsletter

Volume 1 Issue 7

By Ed Duncan, Consultant, SBSC, MCSE, MCSA

Here in south Florida, we are approaching the most active months of the hurricane season. Hopefully your company has plans in place in the event a hurricane or other natural disaster should occur. If not then don't despair, this month's article will cover a few tips to help you get prepared.

Prepare a risk assessment

When doing your disaster recovery planning, prepare for other contingencies besides natural disasters. There are risks to your company in the form of theft, equipment failure, power outages, communication outages, AC or plumbing problems, workplace violence, neighborhood safety hazards, and more. Determine the impact to your business using the various scenarios listed, and the costs required keeping your risk exposure to a minimum.

Prioritize business processes and functions

Prioritize different departments of the business focusing in on those systems and processes that are vital to the operation of the business. Any areas that are essential to the incoming cash flow of the business should be given top priority over other areas of the business. Determine how long the business can survive without specific departments, business processes, or system applications. Look at alternative ways to get these key areas back up and running in a limited fashion.

Get IT involved early

Having your IT support people involved early on in disaster recovery planning is very important. They can help with planning strategies to get voice and data communications rerouted and back up as quickly as possible after a disaster. Hurricane proof colocation facilities are available in south Florida. Keeping your critical servers in these facilities may make sense if your business can't afford to be down for an extended period of time. These facilities can become extremely busy during the imminent approach of a hurricane, so be sure to work with an account representative well in advance to have space reserved for your equipment and personnel.

Keep a copy of important documents

You should plan to keep a binder, a disc, or flash drive with important information in the event your office is damaged or inaccessible. This binder at a minimum should contain important information such as staff emergency contact information, capital asset inventory, inventory of computer equipment, copies of maintenance agreements, insurance information, vendor contact numbers with your account information, and your disaster recovery plan itself. Any documentation that is important to getting your business back up and running should be included. Also if you are not doing online data backups of your servers, you should make sure you have a complete tape or external drive backup of the data stored offsite in a secure location.

Communicate plans to your staff

You may know all the details of your recovery plan, but unless you are planning to do all the work yourself, the plans are useless if not communicated properly to your staff and coworkers. Make sure your staff is fully aware of the recovery plans, and what their specific roles will be during the recovery effort.

Test your recovery plans

Remember back in grade school, about 2 or 3 times a year, the school ran fire drills. The same concept applies here. Having a disaster recovery plan is great, but if it has never been tested, there is a high probability that it won't work as expected. You don't want to be in a situation of finding out that there is a critical flaw in the plan when the disaster is occurring, so it is important to run drills at least once a year to make sure everything will work according to plan.

The primary goals of a disaster recovery plan is to minimize time needed to recover from a disaster, and a guide to follow for getting the business back up and operating in a limited state after the disaster has passed. No plan is perfect and it should be reviewed by you and members of your team periodically and adjustments made when necessary.

Technology Spotlight: Multifunction Copier Scanner Printer

Usually in this section of the newsletter we focus on one product from a particular vendor. This month we took a look at various multifunction copier scanner printers for small business. There are many good products on the market, and trying to narrow the choice down to one proved to be difficult. So what we decided to do instead was go over a few features you should look for if you're in the market for one.

First determine the quality of printouts you are planning to produce. Your choices are pretty much laser or inkjet. Laser is more expensive, but the quality of the documents are crisper and sharper than inkjet. Next determine if you plan to print B&W, color, or both. A pure black and white printer will cost less than a color one, but color documents have more visual appeal. Your intended audience will drive this decision. If you mainly print internal documents then consider B&W and restrict color printing to documents intended for external audiences. Your savings from purchasing black toner or ink over color will add up over the long run.

Next determine how often the printer will be used. This will determine the size of the printer to purchase. If the printer will be shared by several people in the office, make sure it can handle the workload. A good small office printer shared by 10 people or more should be able to print about 30-50 B&W pages per minute. I also like printers that have the ability to sort and staple documents. This comes in handy when printing multiple copies of the same document.

Next look at the supported paper types. Most office printers will have at least 3 different trays for printing letter, legal, and business envelopes. A duplexer for double-sided printing is also standard on most printers. Your savings from purchasing paper is well worth the investment in a duplexer. Also look for a built in network port for easily connecting the printer to your network. Some even have a wireless network receiver to support printing in a wireless networking environment.

The scanner/copier portion of these printers are usually flatbeds, but if you have to scan or copy a multipage document, you should look for one that has a feeder attached. There's nothing worse than trying to scan a big document one page at a time, especially if it's double-sided. Other features you may find valuable are the ability to send emails directly from the scanner, scan files directly to your computer or file server, retrieve files and print directly from the scanner, and send and receive faxes.

Paper jams and other problems are bound to happen, so check that the manufacturer has local authorized service providers in your area who offer same day or next business day service. Regular maintenance is very important for ensuring top performance during the normal wear and tear of everyday use.

Tips & Tricks: How To Prevent Endless Reboots After A System Crash

You may have experienced at some point the following situation: You are working on your computer and it suddenly bluescreens or flashes a system error message for a split second, and then it reboots. During Windows bootup the computer bluescreens again, then reboots again. The process then repeats itself and your computer is stuck in an endless cycle of reboots. What is causing this?

A setting in the Control Panel is usually the culprit. In the Control Panel, click the System icon, then click Advanced System Settings, and then click the Settings button in the Startup and Recovery section. On the following page you will see a check next to "Automatically restart" in the System failure section. Remove that checkmark and your computer will not reboot the next time it experiences a system crash. It is not recommended to change this setting since many problems can be resolved by rebooting the computer, but on those rare occassions when the problem is more serious, having this turned off will help your Tech Support see the error code displayed on the screen, and better diagnose the problem and resolve the issue.