Preplanning and automation are essential for successful backup and recovery, especially in SMB environments where IT departments are often spread thin. Scott Lowe, Founder and Managing Director of The 1610 Group, outlined the roadmap for effective disaster recovery (DR) in a recent entry on the Wikibon blog.

According to Lowe, a sizable portion of organizations don’t have DR plans. These companies are completely dependent on staffers (or potentially just one person) with the appropriate knowledge of their infrastructure and the solutions needed to handle data loss events. He explains that “a situation could strike which makes it impossible for them to take part in a recovery process.”

CIOs must reduce human involvement in order to reduce the risk of data loss. This can be achieved relatively easily in virtualized environments thanks to the “vast number” of workload orchestration tools available on the market. Lowe writes that organizations can leverage these tools to automate complicated tasks by transforming human know-how into software. He elaborates:

“You may need to make sure that domain controllers come up first, followed by database servers, and then the application servers that use those database servers. Further, you might want to make sure domain controllers come up one at a time. With orchestration tools, you can tell your virtual environment about the correct order of operations so that the data center is brought back to life in as close to perfect condition as possible.”

Lowe highlights that relying on humans for critical tasks such as DR is not always practical. The more that an organization can automate, the fewer skills are required to get the job done. Ideally, almost any IT staff member should be able to perform a full recovery.