SEVEN Components of a Successful Disaster: Component Six

June 8, 2015

Component Six: Reassess

Now that we have made it this far, you now know what a successful disaster looks like. You also know specifically the components that need to be recovered to have a successful disaster. You have also established how long you are willing to be out of commission and once up, how much data you are willing to lose, if any. You have made a budget to achieve your goals and you have determined if this is something you want to take on yourself, or if outsourcing makes the most sense. You should be proud, you have accomplished a lot and are getting very close to meeting your goal of positioning your credit union to achieve a successful disaster, should one occur.

You are now at the point of reassessing. Reassessing is necessary because although you may have determined what a successful disaster looks like, the components necessary to achieve a successful disaster and your RTO’s and RPO’s, it may not be realistically possible within the budget you’ve established. You may now need to make adjustments.

  • Did your needs assessment include only the most critical servers or did you add servers that are non-critical, just desirable?
  • Are your RTO’s and RPO’s too rigid? Can you loosen things up a bit?
  • Does your core really need to be up in 15 minutes or can you live with a 4 hours RTO?
  • Can you afford the capex and opex necessary to do it on your own or does it make more financial sense to outsource and go with an opex model?

There are many questions that need to be asked as you reassess. If you choose to outsource, it is important to properly vet each vendor and ensure they can deliver on their promise, which includes a thorough evaluation. Additionally, does your vendor offer recovery tiers based on RTO’s and RPO’s? If you have servers that are important to you but do not necessarily need to be up and running within the first 24 hour window, does your vendor offer price breaks for extending to 48 or 72 hours?

Once you have sifted through all of the information you have gathered, you are in a much better position to determine the best direction for your credit union. The idea is to do your due diligence so you can feel confident in the decision you make. Join us next week for the final installment, “Component Seven: Test, and Test Often”.

 

 

 

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