Book Image

Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Disaster Recovery Guide

By : Peter Ward
Book Image

Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Disaster Recovery Guide

By: Peter Ward

Overview of this book

Where does it all go wrong with disaster recovery? Yes, why a disaster recovery plan fails the business and costs IT staff their jobs or a promotion? This book is an easytounderstand guide that explains how to get it right and why it often goes wrong. Given that Microsoft's SharePoint platform has become a missioncritical application where business operations just cannot run without complete uptime of this technology, disaster recovery is one of the most important topics when it comes to SharePoint. Yet, support and an appropriate approach for this technology are still difficult to come by, and are often vulnerable to technical oversight and assumptions. Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Disaster Recovery Guide looks at SharePoint disaster recovery and breaks down the mystery and confusion that surrounds what is a vital activity to any technical deployment. This book provides a holistic approach with practical recipes that will help you to take advantage of the new 2013 functionality and cloud technologies. You will also learn how to plan, test, and deploy a disaster recovery environment using SharePoint, Windows Server, and SQL tools. We will also take a look at datasets and custom development. If you want to have an approach to disaster recovery that gives you peace of mind, then this is the book for you.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Disaster Recovery Guide
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
4
Virtual Environment Backup and Restore Procedures
Index

Building confidence and refining DR plans with frequent testing


It is a good practice to test your DR plan regularly by failing over to your DR site. I would suggest doing this failover test once a month, but this may not be possible for all enterprises, at the very least, you should be doing it once a quarter to gain confidence and peace of mind knowing that you have a solid and reliable DR plan that works. You have no idea how many clients I have been to that tell me they have a solid DR plan but when we test it they rarely work! This mind-set exists because too many companies believe in set it and forget it, as we mentioned previously, you must test your DR by failing over to your DR site to ensure that it works.

You wouldn't want to find all the issues in your DR plan in the middle of a disaster. Backups alone are useless if you don't have a place to restore them. The way to go from ought to work to known to work is through testing!

The reasons for infrequent testing are usually budgets and the scarcity of time. This is why most failures are usually discovered during a disaster. And at that time you have a few or no practical alternatives.

A well-developed Disaster Recovery plan will identify all key processes and steps to failover to your DR site. It should have a predefined schedule for testing, after each test document any weakness found and what was done to correct them.

New technologies, such as virtualization and cloud computing make regular and (even daily) testing feasible. These technologies allow you to automate processes and provide a foundation for an ongoing RTO and RPO reporting at the management level, allowing you to better estimate and mitigate risks for the business.