Saving Money with IT Security Processes. Example 8/26: Quick Recovery from Backup

Article number 8 in a series dedicated to giving examples of the way IT security processes can help your company save money.

Recovering a server or user data from backed up copy is a well known activity in IT. Not doing so would cause huge losses to the company, including downtimes and manual recovery (double work from the end user). However, you can't ensure that your copies will be functional without a proper Disaster Recovery process. The duties of the Disaster Recovery process manager are the following:

1. Include all new data and servers into the saving mechanisms. This may require that backup people be at the conception phase of each project to ask corresponding questions: what's to be saved? How often? How to access it?
2. Test the recovery mechanisms. Although what's backed up is backed up, you may not be able to use it if only a tiny bit of it is missing or backed up incorrectly. So, recovery should be tested at least once for every business applications and recovery machinery and media should be tested very often.
3. Review the list of what's to be backed up. The copying of older applications can be stopped. Newer versions of the same applications may require new data to be copied.