Why You Need a Disaster Recovery Plan (even if you backup).
Backing up your data is one thing, having a plan for when disaster strikes is another. As you can guess, the two are just as important for ensuring any business can operate continuously without disruption. In reality, many small and medium-size companies fail to plan for disaster recovery. It’s easy to assume that regular backup is going to protect you from any disaster or system failure but the process of recovering data (even if it has been backed up) can be timely and expensive if an effective plan isn’t in place.
Getting it right.
A good disaster recovery plan ensures that all services are replicated to a secure site with near continuous replication to ensure a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) in line with business needs. This helps to minimise any loss of data after recovery from a systems failure.
It also involves a dedicated team to identify and assess risks while following procedures to ensure the most critical applications, documents and resources are recovered for business to continue operating effectively. While the principles of disaster recovery remain the same for any business, the specific components and processes are tailored to ensure the best possible support.
Businesses without a plan can often take 2-4 weeks or longer to recover a productive IT environment from backup data. How many businesses can afford to lose all IT systems for a month with no significant impact to operations or commercial reputation?
A good disaster recovery solution needs:
- Proper upfront planning to ensure all systems will operate effectively in the event of an actual disaster
- Constant monitoring and alerting to ensure all systems are replicating data 24/7
- Proper scheduled testing to ensure that all systems are operating as expected (this should be tested at least annually)
- Guaranteed 24/7 support
Disaster Recovery as a Service
At QuoVadis, we offer Disaster Recovery as a Service to our datacentre customers and for customers with their own internal IT systems. Data is replicated continuously to AWS to ensure a low RPO. In the event of a local production disaster the IT environment can be presented on the AWS cloud to allow users to logon to servers and applications and operate their business as usual.
To learn more, call a QuoVadis Cloud Hosting specialist at +1 441 278 2807 or email us.