How to Strengthen Your IBM Disaster Recovery Plan
Disaster recovery is an essential business component for ensuring that you can recover from any type of disruption. You can implement this strategy through a number of methods, including cloud-based backups and offsite recovery. These methods will help to minimize the amount of time that your systems will be offline during a disaster and ensure that you are able to restore critical data quickly. If you are not prepared for a disaster, it can be very costly to your company.
In the most recent IBM i Marketplace Survey, 62 percent of respondents ranked high availability/disaster recovery as their top priority. This article will discuss ways to strengthen your IBM i disaster recovery plan so you can better protect yourself from downtime and data loss.
A strong DR plan involves testing your backups and recovery procedures. The best way to do this is to replicate your production environment to a separate test environment. This will allow you to measure performance and compare configurations while ensuring that your backups are working as expected. You should also test your disaster recovery plan at least once a year.
If you use a database server, then you can create a separate database for each test environment. This will allow you to test the recovery of each database with different settings. For example, you can set up a test that simulates a hardware failure. This will let you see how long it takes to recover the database and verify that your backups are functioning properly.
You can also test your disaster recovery process by running a script that triggers a failover. It will let you know how long it takes for your DR system to take over, and will give you an idea of whether or not your DR plan is ready for deployment.
It is important to make sure that your DR plan includes a recovery schedule that matches your RPO and RTO. This will help you determine how often to backup your data and how much downtime you can tolerate during a disaster. This information will then be used to design your DR solution. For instance, if you need to restore a very large dataset, then you may want to choose a DR site with a low RTO.
A comprehensive ibm disaster recovery plan should be created for each area of your business. For example, you should create a disaster recovery plan for your manufacturing operations with space to document contingency operations, backup locations, and more. You should also include information about your communication strategies, so that you can keep your employees informed during a disaster. This document will be an invaluable tool to have in the event of a disaster. In addition, you should also consider using a unified disaster recovery management approach to simplify the implementation of your DR plan. IBM Resiliency Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) can deliver end-to-end integrated services across private, public and hybrid cloud. This enables you to quickly restore applications, infrastructure and data, regardless of the type of outage. ibm disaster recovery plan