Disaster Recovery

All companies should have a thorough Disaster Recovery Plan that describes what the company will do if a disaster happens.
To determine what provisions to make for partial or complete loss of data, stakeholders must determine the total cost of rebuilding or replacing the organization's data. Consider the following:
• What are the costs of reconstructing the organization's financial, personnel, and other business data?
• What does the business insurance cover with regard to replacing lost data?
• How long would it take to reconstruct the business’ data? How would this translate into lost future business?
• What is the cost for each hour of server downtime?

Planning Disaster Recovery
A disaster recovery plan is necessary to ensure all systems and data can be quickly restored if a disaster occurs. It is important to determine and prepare for
all the steps required to respond to each type of disaster, and to test the recovery steps by simulating a catastrophic event. A disaster recovery plan can be
structured in many different ways and can contain many types of information, and can include the following:
• Information on who owns the administration of the plan.
• A list of people to be contacted if there is a disaster and instructions on how to contact them.
• A list of potential disasters and a checklist for recovery from each disaster scenario.
• Procedure for performing backups.
• Off-site storage policies.
• Procedures for restoring servers and the network.
• A plan to obtain hardware, if it is necessary.
• How long recovery will take and the final database state the users can expect.
• Steps for reviewing the documentation whenever changes are made to the computers or network.

Disaster Readiness
Perform the following activities to ensure the business is ready for a disaster:
• Perform regular backups of the system and user databases, the transaction log, and the Microsoft Dynamics AX application files to reduce how much data is lost. How frequently a company performs backups depends on how much information they can afford to lose compared to the overhead of performing backups too frequently.
• Thoroughly test backup and recovery procedures on a regularly, scheduled basis.
o Testing ensures the backups are restorable and the recovery procedures are clearly defined and documented.
o Ensure to document the following:
o Database and file user rights.
o Product keys for all the software.
o Service packs installed on Microsoft Windows, the database, and
Microsoft Dynamics AX.
o Documentation that relates to the recovery of other databases,
such as the Windows SharePoint Services.