Introduction

You've written appropriate, solid security policy, your e-commerce servers are patched, your software is well written, and you monitor your Web servers routinely for intrusions. But one of your servers is down anyway. Now what do you do? Whether caused by act of nature, system failure, security breach, or administrative accident, avoiding downed services is impossible. Disasters that cause downtime don't have to come as a complete surprise though. Thinking through what to do before a crisis happens is a necessary part of business known as disaster recovery planning.

This chapter assists you in creating a disaster recovery plan, so that you can identify key areas where prevention may avert the disaster or at least minimize the risk of downtime and you will know how to proceed in the event of any type of loss. Ensuring that your backup and restore systems are optimized is essential. Adding fault tolerance to your Web site eliminates single points of failure in your configurations that can be the cause of downtime; this chapter discusses various methods of increasing redundancy. Another form of redundancy, protection, and recovery this chapter covers is choosing a remote hot site location and services in the case of a natural disaster such as flooding. Last, we explore the relatively new field of insurance as it relates to e-commerce liabilities.

What is Disaster Recovery Planning?

The Disaster Recovery Journal (www.drj.com), an electronic journal dedicated to business continuity during emergencies, defines a disaster as "Any event that creates an inability on...