Has your business got a comprehensive Disaster Recovery plan in place or do you see it as an expensive luxury? Few people would doubt the benefit of house insurance yet many businesses skimp on something that could help the business survive a major outage.
Few companies would argue about the value of a comprehensive Disaster Recovery plan that covers all areas of the business and holds the key to successfully resuming day to day business activity should the worst happen.
Most businesses would be pretty unlucky to suffer from major downtime due to things like fire, flood or theft. Terrorism generates a huge amount of column inches and the effects of something like 911 are truly devastating however even in the current climate these occurrences are thankfully few and for between.
What is more likely to happen is an email sever failure, a corrupt database or the network being compromised by a virus. Guarding against this type of outage should be the bare minimum a company should cater for, even though most of us could cope for a few hours without email, for some businesses this would lead to a huge loss in revenue.
If a server failed completely, most IT Departments wouldn’t promise delivery of the service back up and running normally in anything less that a day because this would mean relying on tape backups to rebuild the data held by the server. Commonly accepted logic is that tape isn’t all that reliable (a side issue is that most companies don’t perform regular tape restores, so don’t know how good the data on the tape is – even if they can get is back).
If a company can ‘get by’ for a couple of days without the server in place then this tells us how critical to the business this particular server or application is. For these servers using tape isn’t probably too much of a problem, but for other more mission critical application, hanging around while the hardware is rebuilt is unlikely to have the FD jumping with joy.
For critical applications think about some ‘on-site’ data replication. What this means in simple terms is that the data on Server A is replicated real time to Server B. Should server A fail, it’s a simple matter to failover to Server B, normally within a couple of minutes. Because the data has been replicated up to point of failure the users won’t lose lots of data and the system will be up and running much quicker.
Of course, this provides local high availability which although gives protection against server failure it doesn’t provide any real Disaster Recovery, if the office burns to the ground, the data will be lost. However, having invested in this local high availability solution it’s a relatively simple process to replicate the data off-site as well and deliver a true local and remote high availability and Disaster Recovery solution.
Disaster Recovery can be seen as an expensive luxury but it really depends on how you view it and more importantly how you implement it. In the current economic climate you can probably think of lots of other things to spend your limited budget on, however can you really afford for your main business systems to be off line? The good news is that you identify the key processes that make up your business and the IT platforms that support it, you have your starting point and like all things, it doesn’t have to cost the earth.
One last thought for those who see Disaster Recovery a bit like insurance, do any of you regard house insurance as unnecessary?
Sorry, the server’s down, can you call back later? Part 2
Having started your Business Continuity planning, two vital considerations should be how soon do you need to have your systems back up and running and how up to date does the recovered data need to be? These 2 factors will dictate what solutions you put in place as no business has an endless budget for Disaster Recovery.
Sorry, the server’s down, can you call back later? Part 1
Fed up of calling a company only to be told the system’s down? Even worse, has this happened to your company? This is terrible for business and you risk customers going elsewhere – so what do you do about it? Well firstly, don’t worry, help is at hand. Perform Risk & Business Impact Analysis to understand where the real problems are, then implement the right Business Continuity strategy for your business and your data.
