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Disaster Preparation & Recovery Self-Assessment
System Level Questions
1. Is your architecture scaled for High Availability?
2) Is your architecture scaled for Disaster Recovery?
3) If government controls apply to your organization (i.e. Sarbanes Oxley), do your current recovery methods take that into account?
4) Are your archives (e-mails, files) full-text searchable?
5) Are plans in place for alternate telephone and fax services?
6) Is there a disaster recovery location already determined and an alternate site agreement in place to conduct business operations?
7) Is there a continuity of operations planned that states the expectations for system recovery times?
8) Do the current support agreements (server maintenance, software support) concur with the management decisions for acceptable recovery time?
E-mail Recovery
1) Are your e-mail servers clustered to ensure availability in the case of a server outage?
2) Are the servers dispersed to survive facility damage or connectivity loss?
3) Are e-mail archives user managed or system managed?
4) How long are e-mails retained?
5) Are archived e-mails full-text searchable to facilitate information retrieval from former employees?
File Recovery
1) How are my key business files (documents, spreadsheets, etc) backups up right now?
2) Where are they stored?
3) How long are they retained?
4) Who knows how to restore them?
5) When was the last time an attempt to restore was tested?
6) Can I still view old file types since I've upgraded my applications several times in the last few years?
7) How long would it take to restore my server if a complete failure would occur?
8) Are my security policies implemented in my backup solution or does everyone have access to restored files?
Database Recovery
1) How much downtime can you afford?
2) How are databases backed up today?
3) Where are the backups stored?
4) How long do you retain backups?
5) How long does it take to restore full operational capability in the event of a server loss?
6) Besides the database,is the current operating system configuration saved to ensure restore compatibility?
Network Recovery
1) Do you have redundant network providers?
2) In case of facility damage, do you have secure Virtual Private Network access so key staff can work from remote locations?
3) Do the security policies protect you from unauthorized access?
System Backups
1) Are are backing up all the critical information and servers, desktops, and laptop computers?
2) Do your backups support unix/linux file systems?
3) In case of laptop loss/theft, is there a backup?
4) IS your active directory (LDAP) replicated across geographically separated servers to facilitate recovery in
case of catastrophic loss?
5) Are your backups virus free?
6) Was your last backup successful? How do you know?
Downtime Facts:
99.999% available (five nines) - 5 minutes downtime per year
99.99% (four nines) - 52 minutes downtime per year
99.95% - 4.3 hours downtime per year
How much can you afford to lose?
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