For most businesses, it’s unlikely that ‘disaster’ will result in loss of life, however the consequences will inevitably include significant disruption, and the financial implications could be crippling if suitable plans aren’t in place to minimise the impact.
The importance of a disaster recovery plan and backup technology
The starting point is to understand which services and which data are critical to the business. Then it’s about assessing the financial implications, which might include everything from the cost of rekeying lost data to reputational damage.
This information will then inform your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and your Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
What are RPO and RTO
RPO or Recovery Point Objective
How much data can you afford to lose? It might be 5 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, a couple of days or even none at all.
RTO or Recovery Time Objective
How quickly do you need to get services and data back available? Again this could be minutes, days or as close to instant as possible.
Will production cease completely if you lose your manufacturing system or data? Will you still be able to take orders and turn them around for delivery to meet your customers’ expectation?
Even if you have a regular backup routine in place, it’s also important to understand the time it will take to recover the data and reinstall the operating systems and applications required to get you up and running again. Our experts can talk to you about putting disaster recovery and backup plans in place to suit your business requirements.
Here are a couple of blogs on disaster recovery that are well worth a read
Key technologies
Datto
Instant replication was previously out of reach for most small and medium sizes business, but Datto’s innovative solution combines backup and business continuity to allows instant recovery at both a system and file level.
Gamma Horizon
As the deadline for ISDN switch off approaches, Gamma Horizon’s Hosted Telephony solution brings flexibility and disaster recovery along with all the features you’re used to from your traditional telephone system.
Backupify
As your users depend more on cloud-based applications, Backupify protects your business from accidental deletions, ex-employees and even malicious activity, allowing you to instantly restore accounts and data.
Thankfully, many modern technologies have an element of business continuity build in, especially cloud-based services such as Office 365, which can be accessed from any device and any location where there is connectivity.
Historically, instant failover or recovery – typically with replication – has been out of reach of most business but new developments are now offering affordable alternatives.
