Disaster Recovery - Overview

The ability to recover designated critical systems within specific time frames.

Protection of data and Business Continuity are growing concerns for most businesses and a great deal of money is spent trying to protect a corporation's data. Costs include back-up servers, back-up licenses, tape libraries and employees who are responsible for ensuring that the information is protected and protected properly.

The largest issue is that most businesses do not know, with any certainty, that their information is properly protected, and because they do not know, they are exposed to data and business interruption.

Offsite Backup services will provide your business with 100% certainty that your data is protected on a daily basis, will help reduce costs, reduce risk, and simplify the way in which data protection is managed. Data Replication combined with application mirroring will provide your business with the ability to use your data during the event of a disaster.

Recovery Services

Before deciding on the appropriate level of protection for your business, you should first be able to answer these questions:

• How much does down time cost our business in lost revenue, wages paid to idle employees, time and energy to recreate data, loss of new business, reputation, etc.?
• How long can my business' data be inaccessible for?
• Which data must be online first?
• What types of disasters am I looking to protect against? Do I want to protect against hardware failures, electrical failures, etc. as well as inaccessibility to our building?

For a small business, the Principals and Management may be able to answer these questions themselves. For the mid-sized and large companies, our Business Continuity Consultants can help you determine the answers to these questions as well as provide methodologies and industry standards on how to keep your business running during a business interruption.
Understanding the following terms is the next step in determining how your company's data should be protected, which then drives the appropriate technology for data protection and business continuity.

Recovery Time Objective - RTO

The amount of time it takes to make your applications and data available to your employees and clients. “We must have our systems back online within X number of hours.” X number of hours is your RTO. Typically, not all applications and systems must be brought back online within the same time frame. Review the impact of downtime from each of your systems and we will design your recovery around your objectives.

Recovery Point Objective - RPO

The point in time to which data must be recovered after an outage. “We cannot afford to lose more than 4 hours or 24 hours worth of work.” For your mission critical data, our real-time replication provides you with Continuous Data Protection (CDP), ensuring that as you create data, it is immediately secured off-site, for zero data loss. For less critical data, our Off-Site Data Backup and Vaulting services provide you with a 24 hour RPO.
Whether your business has a low RTO requiring fast recovery, or the need for long term off-site data protection, our services will help you reach your goals or compliance requirements. Contact us today to help you design a solution specific to your business needs.

Most regulations do not mandate how data should be protected but do have disaster planning requirements and require provisions for data backup. Compliance is only the catalyst, not the driver - Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity solutions should have their own value and should allow IT to better support the business.

Top Disaster Recovery Roadblocks

• Lack of planning, resources and time
• Lack of knowledge or expertise
• Setting unrealistic deadlines
• Lack of practice or exercise

The Keys to Success

• Understand what is critical to your business
• Know the value of data and downtime
• Think beyond tape backup
• Get your data out of the building
• Recover systems quickly
• Practice, practice, practice
• Don't forget people, process, communication

Understanding industry terms and acronyms will help you in designing your business continuity and disaster recovery plans. See our comprehensive Business Continuity Glossary to learn more.

You can find additional planning resources for Business Continuity at the Disaster Recovery Journal's web site. Click here for sample Business Continuity Plans, Outlines and Sample Recovery Plans.