Welcome to the fourth quarter, the time when most IT departments are working hard to tie up loose ends and complete projects before the end of the fiscal year. Economic conditions have caused organizations to do more with less. They are tasked with protecting a growing amount of mission-critical data, often with a shrinking budget.

The final post in this series of five hidden DR hazards involves underestimating your resource and skillset requirements. When creating a do-it-yourself disaster recovery solution, you must consider your team’s personal priorities and also their ability to access your remote site.

Building a disaster recovery site can be an exciting project for ambitious IT teams. It involves a great deal of planning and results in a high degree of satisfaction once the environment is complete, the budget is justified and the equipment is procured and configured. Overall it is a gratifying experience– until it’s time to test the solution.

I’ve been writing about the hidden hazards of do-it-yourself disaster recovery. One of these hazards is hardware/software drift. Since your disaster recovery site represents a working replica of the production environment, it will need to be maintained on an ongoing basis. There are several strategies for how hardware and software are provisioned for your DR site. The strategies you choose will determine the how much maintenance will be needed to keep your DR site running at an optimal level.