Why you must plan for a Disaster
As IT systems have become increasingly critical to the smooth operation of a company the importance of ensuring the continued operation of those systems, or the rapid recovery of the systems, has increased.
It is estimated that most companies spend between 2% and 4% of their IT budget on disaster recovery planning, with the aim of avoiding larger losses in the event that the business cannot continue to function due to loss of IT infrastructure and data. Of companies that had a major loss of business data, 43% never reopen, 51% close within two years, and only 6% will survive long-term (DTI) As a result, preparation for continuation or recovery of systems needs to be taken very seriously. This involves a significant investment of time and money with the aim of ensuring minimal losses in the event of a disruptive event.
Classification of Disasters
Disasters can be classified in two broad categories. The first is natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, tornadoes or earthquakes. While preventing a natural disaster is very difficult, a good continuity plan which includes mitigation measures can help reduce or avoid losses. The second category is man-made disasters such as hazardous material spills, infrastructure failure, employee sabotage or bio-terrorism.
DR Planning
Disaster recovery planning is a subset of a larger process known as Business Continuity planning and should include planning for resumption of applications, data, hardware, communications (such as networking) and other IT infrastructure. A good disaster recovery plan will need to take into account a business’s stated service level agreement for application and data recovery time and recovery point objectives.
Determining Your RTO and RPO
RTO deals with how quickly an application has to be back up and running after a failure (i.e. “How much time it will take to recover after notification of a business process disruption ?”), while RPO deals with the amount of data that can be lost (i.e. “Up to what point in time can the data be recovered ?“) RTO and RPO can also be defined in terms of money. That is, how long can you afford to be down for and how much data can you afford to lose.
You can decide to have different RTO and RPO for each business critical application. This will allow you to determine the type of disaster recovery solution you put in place.
How can Supreme Systems Help?
Our Disaster Recovery solutions offers:
- RPO of up to 30 minutes and RTO of up to 4hrs
- Block Level Transfer
- 30 minute Incremental Snapshots for optimal recovery points
- Whole Windows Server Backup
- Microsoft Exchange Granular Recovery
- Rapid failover server virtualization
- Bare Metal Restore
- Data Encryption
- Multiple replication schemes
To find out more about our Disaster Recovery Solutions please call 0800 001 5942 to speak to one of our Technology Specialists or email vip@supremesystems.co.uk
