Enterprise Systems Backup and Recovery: A Corporate Insurance Policy
Any company that relies on their data and their IT infrastructure needs to take a formal approach to planning, deploying, managing and monitoring their backup system. Even in smaller companies, where an ad-hoc/informal approach seems sufficient, there are considerable benefits to be gained by taking the time to do things right.
One of the factors that leads to a delay in adopting more formal processes within just about any environment however is the time taken to develop the documentation that helps to define those processes.
To assist companies in adopting a more formal approach to their backup environment, I've developed some templates based on recommendations in the book.
Deploying a new backup system requires rigorous testing to ensure that data and systems really can be recovered when required. You can find here templates in the following formats:
Building a procedure that can be instantly used by any company is next to impossible - what the above sample procedures should do however is introduce one approach to formalised testing, and give sufficient structure and examples to allow a company to adopt the template for their own needs.
In order to have an audit trail, and a log of periodic tests conducted, maintenance of a test register is paramount. This should leverage both ad-hoc tests, as well as tests from the acceptance test procedures, in order to cover as wide a variety of situations as possible. You can find here templates in the following formats:
While smaller companies will approach recoveries in an ad-hoc manner, for larger companies, and companies requiring compliance to data integrity and security regulations, it will be necessary to formalise the process of requesting a recovery - this allows for larger volumes of recoveries, as well as the auditing of who requested what, and when.
You can find here templates in the following formats:
Depending on the environment, recovery requests may be able to be processed electronically, or they may require physical document submissions to ensure they are correctly signed for. Remember that many signatures are worthless without an accompanying name!
Too often, backups are considered as an afterthought once a system has gone into place - sometimes even after it has been running in production for a while. This new system form should at least be a starting place for companies wanting to better integrate backup preparedness into change control. You can find here templates in the following formats:
In chapter 11, a sample checklist is provided that may be used when evaluating multiple backup products; that checklist is primarily designed for in-house comparison by staff. The checklist below is a sample of the style of document that may be used to have vendors provide a list of functionality. Use it as a building block and extend it to suit your organisation when planning a new purchase. You can find here templates in the following formats: