There tends to be a fair amount of confusion regarding what Disaster Recovery is all about, what areas of risk it covers and why it's so important to mitigate risk by having a disaster recovery plan. In this introduction we provide a definition for Disaster Recovery Planning, we look at why DR is becoming a more visible business priority and we discuss the terms used to refer to disaster recovery planning and the scope of different plans.

The first part of an article looking at 10 common issues that you need to be aware of when planning for Disaster Recovery.

The first step in developing a disaster recovery plan is to work with the business to determine the objectives for your plan. This includes determining metrics such as the Recovery Time Objective and the Recovery Point Objective for critical business processes, which you can then map to your IT environment. This tutorial gets you started with determining the objectives for your plan.

This article can be used to provide your end users with an overview of what Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity is and to give them a better understanding of why it is important.

In the previous tutorials, you should have determined the Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) for critical business processes and mapped those to various parts of your IT infrastructure. In this chapter we'll review the primary disaster recovery strategies that may be appropriate based on your objectives and budget.

Once you have determined a Disaster Recovery strategy it's time to do some work in your primary IT environment with two very important objectives in mind. The first is to improve the resiliency of your systems (prevention is better than cure) and the second is to ensure that when it's time to recover you have everything you need to successfully recover.