Business Disaster Recovery
& Continuity (DRaaS)
IT disaster recovery guide
Business continuity no longer extends only as far as data protection. To ensure your company can continue to exist when the worst happens - you must have a disaster recovery plan.
Without a disaster recovery solution in place, your worst-case scenario of ceasing trading becomes a genuine possibility. Getting business-critical applications up and running again quickly thanks to a disaster recovery plan is no longer a wish list item, but a critical business need.
This requirement for DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) has never been more critical as business continuity threats grow and evolve continually. What a DRaaS does is replicate and host your data on third-party servers to provide backup in case of natural disaster, power outage, or other business disruption.
The list of potential threats grows by the day, from ransomware, employee errors, natural disasters like flooding, hurricanes, earthquakes, power outages, and other downtime-causing events. Even if the duration is relatively short, the cost of downtime can be massive. Businesses must be prepared for all types of scenarios that could befall their company.
Disaster recovery and lab analysis
The best service providers will also provide a straightforward means to test your recovery preparations in advance.
A company should always stress test its Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective, two critical parameters of any disaster recovery plan. These two measures guide businesses in choosing their optimal plan for business continuity and disaster recovery. Consider the following:
-
Automatic disaster recovery testing: You will require automation as manual testing is time-consuming and relies on busy humans' input. Automated disaster recovery testing runs unseen in the background.
-
Cloud and local: Look for a provider who will test and certify your recovery objectives in-house and in the cloud.
-
Lab analysis: Many service providers will supply a lab sandbox for testing and data analysis.
-
Automatic reports: Check for built-in reporting of recovery test outcomes. These can be shared with management and stakeholders to maintain a level of confidence in your company's disaster recovery preparations.
-
Predictive Analytics: Artificial intelligence and machine learning can alert you to the presence of ransomware or hardware failures. Having a heads up about these incursions will enable you to take early action before data is lost or compromised.
-
Instant recovery locally: Server failure or other local outages are time-sensitive, so you will wish to have the capacity to instantly recover and keep your business operational with the minimum of fuss. Ensure your prospective vendor offers instant recovery that you can initiate to recover virtual machine failure or corruption, or a physical Windows server going down. Check that you can do this with the package they are offering. Accessing the full data set within minutes will avert costly repercussions of downtime. Instant recovery should be easily accessible to authorized users to ensure work can continue as usual, following an unplanned server outage. Once you have the server fully operational again, everything can then be migrated back at a time when it will not adversely affect business operations.
-
Multi-site replication: Enterprises with multiple sites or who wish to have full control of their disaster recovery planning will require site to site replication. This means that various sites can supply off-premises data storage and act as disaster recovery hubs by replicating data between geographically dispersed locations.
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
It is always important to make sure to preserve uptime by launching apps on the cloud. The continuity of business should be seamless. Therefore, we offer a range of service levels to suit your needs and budget.
We offer cloud management that lets you select specific machines to replicate or select specific computers to control the budget commitment.
Unlimited replication or your most critical servers is another important service we offer. This type of service is part of our on-going automated Disaster Recovery testing.
Our 'white glove service' option provides you with on-site support to help you recover from a disaster situation and rebuild your network at your premises. It will typically also include quick response shipping of data to your office.
Intuitive & easy to manage
If this is a company priority, then be careful about which backup solution you select. It should be WAN-accelerated, offer optimized replication, plus advanced automation and deployment to minimize the need for manual recovery inputs.
Ideally, all of this should be accessible from a single user interface. The best disaster recovery specialists will offer companies with multiple sites or service providers catering for multiple clients, enterprise-grade data management. Their service offering should make it easy for companies to monitor and manage thousands of machines.
You may also wish to discover whether your potential DR provider supports role-based management. This functionality will allow groups to control their backups without others on the network having access or visibility.
But how can enterprises balance the need for the optimum disaster recovery solution with making the best use of limited resources and budget?
Without a doubt, this is a challenge and entails discussing your detailed requirements with disaster recovery and business continuity specialists. You must clearly explain your needs and expectations without assuming the vendor has any inside knowledge of your business.
Ideally, you want to choose a vendor whose disaster recovery and business continuity solution most closely meets your needs. Ultimately, the goal is to find backup tools and a DRaaS solution that's automated and will ease the burden on your company's IT resources.
The best solution will supply intelligent analytics to demonstrate an outage's potential impact. It will also help detect possible outages and prevent them from causing costly downtime.
You want to be 100% confident that the solution you choose will protect your data and applications and is readily accessible in the event of a downtime disaster. Check that the vendor offers mirroring of multiple sites, instant recovery, as well as cloud failover.
