Why should your Company perform a Disaster Recovery Assessment?

Your Company’s IT infrastructure grows more complex every day. Does your company have:
  • Data on premise
  • Data in multiple brick and mortar data centers or server rooms in different locations
  • Data in a private cloud
  • Data in a public cloud
  • Data in a hybrid cloud (or other cloud construct)
  • Data on desk tops, laptops, tablets, other mobile devices
Did you answer yes to more than one of the above? In the past, disaster recovery was a site centric function. Your company had data that was created and/or updated at a location and processes were put in place to back up that data periodically and transport it offsite physically, electronically or in some cases both.

The new risk area in disaster recovery is geographic dispersion or data fragmentation where in some cases, data may be dispersed across multiple locations and may need to be backed up and recovered in new and synchronized ways. It may also be that data is being created and stored in devices that never existed before and were never considered when disaster recovery plans were created. What if your staff is maintaining their client list on their smart phone and the phone dies? Shouldn’t your company have a mandatory backup capability for corporate data wherever it is located?

In addition, the magnitude of today’s data creates additional risk. It is one thing to plan for the recovery of megabytes (MB) or gigabytes (GB). However, have you considered how much time it might take to backup or recover hundreds of terabytes (TB), petabytes (PB) or exabytes (EB)? Again, new methodologies need to be considered.

The purpose of doing a Disaster Recovery Assessment is to:
  • Ensure that there are appropriate governance and policies in place to provide management and staff structure and focus in the event of an Incident.
  • Ensure that the appropriate technologies are in place so that the systems and data are being adequately protected and available for recovery.
  • Ensure that the staff is aware of the Incident plans and can be notified when the plans are implemented.
  • Ensure that in the event of an Incident, your business can recover.
  • Ensure that when all effects of an Incident have been abated, your company can return to business as usual.
SII Assessment Approach

The System Infrastructure Innovators Disaster Recovery Assessment Offering provides:
  • A high level Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
    • What does your staff do? (Business Processes)
    • How important to the business is their work? (Business Process Prioritization)
    • How long can these processes be interrupted before causing monetary or reputational damage to the business? (Impact Quantification)
  • An analysis of your company’s current level of availability planning (Current State)
  • An analysis of the state of your company’s IT inventory (CMDB)
  • An analysis of your company’s current ability to recover, Gap identification and/or availability enhancement opportunities (Future State)
  • High level plans and cost estimates (where possible) to remediate the gaps/enhancements (Transformation from Current State to Future State)
It is important to note that you will decide which gaps will be remediated and in what sequence and schedule.


Conducting a Disaster Recovery Assessment can provide your company the information needed to consider the appropriate levels of Incident preparedness.  Contact us today to discuss your needs.