Have you reviewed your disaster recovery plan with regards to your Perspective on-premise system lately? Whether you are dealing with a server failure or a flood, ensuring you have a viable backup plan is a crucial component of disaster recovery. It’s for this reason that PPM follows an ongoing, rigorous testing and review process for Perspective SaaS.
We’ve recently seen a couple of examples at client sites where disaster recovery planning has failed so I wanted to take a second to remind our on-premise Perspective clients why this is so important. In one client’s case, the backups were being stored on the same Perspective server that experienced a severe hardware failure and as a result, the client lost all of their data. For another client, a production database accidentally got updated and locating the backup proved time-consuming which ended up taking their system down for hours. These types of scenarios can be prevented by making sure you and your IT team have a plan in place.
Here are some questions you should be asking your IT team to ensure you are prepared:
- Are we following best practice recommendations from Microsoft for SQL Server backups?
- Do we have a disaster recovery plan in place should something happen to our Perspective server?
- Are our backups stored in the same physical location as the database files?
- How often are our backups scheduled to run?
- Have we recently tested restoring a backup to a test server to verify that the restoration process will work in the event of a real emergency?
The following Microsoft links will assist your organization in answering the questions above and formulating an effective, reliable disaster recovery plan.
Best Practice recommendations for SQL Server Database Backups:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2027537
Planning for Disaster Recovery:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178094(v=SQL.90).aspx
—Lenora Thomas, Director, Customer Service & Technical Support Services