Preventing disasters

As we proceed through this chapter, we'll look at ways we can recover from disasters. If we can prevent a disaster from occurring in the first place, then that's even better. We certainly can't prevent every type of disaster that can possibly happen, but having a good plan in place and following that plan will lessen the likelihood. A good disaster recovery plan will include a list of guidelines to be followed in regards to implementing new servers and managing current ones. This plan may include information such as an approved list of hardware (such as hardware configurations known to work efficiently in an environment) as well as rules and regulations for users, a list of guidelines to ensure physical and software security, proper training for end users, and methods of change control. Some of these concepts we've touched on earlier in the book, but they are worth repeating from the standpoint of disaster prevention.

First, we talked about the Principle...