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Natural or man-made hazards can exploit vulnerable areas of a company. Data, an organization’s most prized possession, can be compromised in an instant. Negligence, hurricanes or engineering failures won’t bring about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but any of these potential disasters can leave companies desperate if they haven’t properly planned.

Proper planning eases some of the anxiety about “what will we do” or “what can we do” if a disaster strikes. Capacity planning should be used in a disaster recovery plan to ensure that back-up resources are sufficient and service levels can be met in this type of emergency situation.

Assess the impact
One of the first steps of disaster recovery planning should be to assess the business impact and risk. How can companies plan for something when they don’t know how it will impact their business or organizations?

It is important to identify the impact a disaster would have on critical business functions by evaluating key elements:

• Potential threats
• Regulatory requirements
• Organizational reputation
• Allowable downtime
• Critical business processes

Without identifying the impact and executing a disaster recovery plan, companies risk profitability, or worst case, the ability to keep their doors open after a disaster. One study provides statistics regarding a company’s life expectancy after a major loss of computerized records:

• 43 percent never reopen
• 51 percent close within two years
• 6 percent survive long-term

According to a 2006 Forrester survey, purchasing or upgrading disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities was a critical priority for IT executives in North America and Europe.

In fact, purchasing these capabilities outpaced other important initiatives such as:

• Security upgrades
• IT infrastructure consolidation
• Regulatory compliance
• ITIL processes

Use the right tools
Capacity modeling tools can be used to determine impacts of running limited application mixes on the servers. For example, one could run only mission critical applications at a hot site, leaving less critical back-office functions to be sourced through a cold site option, which is much less expensive.

Capacity modeling tools can also be used to predict infrastructure requirements at the hot site.

A hot site is a place that is ready for operating systems and applications to be loaded and services restored, typically within 24 hours.
 
A cold site is basically an empty room to which equipment is moved, installed, and operating systems and applications loaded. The typical restoration time for a cold site is three to five days.

Be prepared. Don’t let one of the company’s most prized assets fall prey to poor planning.