Disaster Recovery: Location, Location, Location

A comment from a reader offers a reminder that effective disaster recovery planning -- and successful DR in the event of disaster -- requires more than just IT and personnel planning. You have to know where those resources are going to be able to work.The comment, in reference to 3 Disaster Recovery Tips (Or Risks!) You May Have Overlooked, is worth repeating here:

One issue that is easily overlooked is the location of your key staff that will be needed on your recovery team. I am aware of a key financial services company that had most of it's key staff in one of two buildings, both in a target rich area of a major city. One building was over a commercial parking lot and the other had a circular driveway in front. Just getting to the backup site, if something happened downtown, would be a challenge.

While this company did build a new data center and office building a safe distance from downtown, I suspect that things are not better today due to staff reductions, among other things.

Lesson learned: to the extent possible, diversify the location of your key staff. If that's not possible, encourage telecommuting so that not all the key people are at work on any given day. As mentioned previously, you should promote and practice telecommuting anyway.

Good points all, and another reminder of the need to consider all the alternatives, complications and contingencies that may arise if you're hit with a disaster, whether a large regional catastrophe or a more localized (perhaps as local as your facility alone) interruption of your ability to do business.

When planning for disaster recovery, how much consideration have you given to the location where the recovery efforts will take place?

And do you have backup (as it were) locations in mind should your primary recovery facilities be rendered unavailable by the disaster?

These, by the way, were some of the DR topics discussed in out recent bMighty bSecure SMB Security On A Budget online event, now available on-demand.

Check it out here: