Data centres hog all the attention today but we still remember how LAN (Local Area Networks) has always been the essential building brick of basic networking. As such, building a sustainable plan for disaster recovery for your entire network starts with designing one for your LAN (Local Area Network).
Before you conjure up images of some sort of irreversible, catastrophic extent of damage to your IT network, it’s not always of this magnitude. IT networks, however, are indeed vulnerable. An electric surge there, an employee initiated mistake, or intentional sabotage can still cause disaster to a LAN network which is enough to bring about sufficient damage in terms of time, effort, man hours, and monetary losses.
What Disaster Recovery Involves?
First, take an inventory of your network and identify critical data, parts of network (or maybe all of it), and respective locations of the same. These elements you will identify will include switches, routers, data locations, WLAN controllers, Wi-Fi access points, and other network appliances.
Use commercially available (or open source) applications – if you can -- to scan and manage your LAN networks. Applications and software will help you take inventory when you need to, classify all elements of your network and other connected devices (you can identify even the roving mobile users). You might also be able to identify physical locations of these devices within your network.
Capture configuration data for your network devices, Ethernet switches, and other configuration settings for your wireless networks. Determine the relative criticality of your network items that you classified previously and work with your networking team to take back-ups, initiate drills on disaster recovery, etc. Avoid the presence of any single points of failure within your network.
An enterprise network should be capable of coming back to life in the event of a disaster – however small or big it might be. For that to happen, develop a simple plan incorporate the above mentioned points and using other best practices such a documentation and testing. Perhaps, you can try virtualization to allow yourself more options for Local Area Network Disaster Recovery.
We have been helping clients all the way from creating plans for disaster recovery and all the way up to actually executing these plans. If you’d like to talk to us, we’d be glad to hear from you.
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