Knowing your risks
The basic concept behind disaster recovery planning is to try to mitigate the effects of events that are outside your control; for example, you cannot control whether or not the public power grid will continue to supply electricity to your installation. So you can employ uninterruptible power supplies, secondary public sources, and diesel generators to compensate. As a general rule, powers outages are temporary and won't qualify as true disasters. While you'll certainly need to plan for them, you'll need to focus your planning on larger issues. There are three general risk categories:
- Physical loss
- Data loss
- Data corruption
Physical loss
The most common disaster preparedness scenarios focus on physical loss. Common risks for all installations will be fire and theft. Depending on your location, you may have other concerns such as tornados, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. Many of these risks can be mitigated with technological, construction...
