10 Planning Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery for Digital Assets
service in place before an event—one that can be trusted—is an excellent fi rst
step to preventing getting robbed after you’ve just had a disaster!
Th e plan, just in the process of putting it together, should produce some
benefi ts for your library. First, you can act to prevent some disasters once
they’ve been identifi ed. You can train staff on disaster recovery procedures if
you have a working document to train from. You also have the opportunity
to get supplies that might be needed to get your technology back up and
running—whether that be a generator for emergency power or putting aside
an extra server for emergency replacement purposes. You can also take the
planning time to assign responsibilities so that everyone knows who needs to
do what in the chaotic time after a disaster. Finally you can learn what tech-
niques you need to recover your technology before the disaster happens. Th e
worst time to learn how to do something is in the middle of a stressful time
anyway, so making sure that the tools and techniques you need are in place is
a huge benefi t when the time comes to use them.
After the plan is put together and the committee has produced the fi nal
document and distributed it to everyone who needs a copy you can rest—for a
short while. Th e plan should be reviewed and tested regularly and that review
and testing process should start within a few months—six at the most—of the
end of the document creation process. It should continue, every six months
without fail, until a disaster strikes. Every year, at least, a review of the docu-
ment should be undertaken to ensure that the information is up-to-date. Tech-
nology changes fast, and if you can do a review every six months, that would
be best, but no more than a year should pass without the document being
updated and made current in regards to your technology and human resources.
Considering human resources, do you put in individual names or roles
into the plan as you are creating it? Th at’s a decision each library will need to
make, but the easiest way to keep a plan up-to-date is to use roles in the body
of the plan, but have lists of the people (including outside the library contact
information) as the fi rst page or two of the plan itself. It is easier to update
a list of people that resides on a sheet of paper you can just update, reprint,
and fi le than to try to fi nd every instance of Barbara’s name in the plan and
replace it, usually requiring reprinting the whole thing, once Barbara moves
on to another position.
Once the disaster is over, and the recovery is starting, there are a few things
you should do in order to make sure you recover completely. First thing is to
assess the damage—what was damaged and what needs attention fi rst? Can
you document the damage (e.g., photos for physical damages to your hard-
ware and equipment, documentation of what was lost for software, and data
losses)? Once you know what was damaged, then you can start to work on
recovering the most mission-critical systems (the ones that had already been
identifi ed by your plan, of course) and start to get back on your feet. During
this period, you can decide what equipment can be saved and what needs to
be scrapped or replaced.
