Utilize idle equipment to ensure business continuity in case of a disaster. By developing a devoted back-up site – which can be used to process non-critical workloads or in testing and development – you mitigate the risk of extended network downtime when a disaster or interruption does occur. You can allocate critical workloads to the back-up site immediately overriding non-critical network activities.

Sparing ensures you have the right parts at the most important time. Designing a Spare Parts Management program is a crucial strategy for emergency network back-up that can meet most budgets. Should your equipment failure be caused by routine usage or a sudden disaster, having spare equipment on hand significantly reduces recovery time.

When planning the purchases for your network, consider business continuity. Funding for disaster recovery purchases can be challenging, but system upgrades can create the opportunity to help you purchase new equipment. While upgrading your network, consider selling or consigning surplus or idle equipment and use the funds to lessen the costs of new equipment for your upgrade and for redundant business continuity components.

Create a dedicated recovery data center to ensure lost data can be retrieved. Point-of-failure recovery must be established in just hours – a daunting task for the most experienced network manager. To help you recover your data within 24 hours, it has been recommended by experts that a recovery data center that reflects the actual production environment be established and used in cases of network failure. To mitigate the costs of a recovery data center consider investing in pre-owned networking equipment – which can cut the costs of building out the infrastructure by half.