Having started your Business Continuity planning, two vital considerations should be how soon do you need to have your systems back up and running and how up to date does the recovered data need to be? These 2 factors will dictate what solutions you put in place as no business has an endless budget for Disaster Recovery.
In Part 1we looked at how to get the fundamentals of Business Continuity planning in place. Looking at what risks there are to your organisation and how to assess business critical processes and procedures. Most importantly facing the uncomfortable facts of the likely implications should you be unlucky enough to suffer a disaster.
After the first stage of consultancy you should be in a position to understand 2 key areas:
1. Recovery Time Objective (RTO). How soon must you have systems back up and running?
2. Recovery Point Objective (RPO).When you do get your systems back online, how current must the data be?
In other words, if you can get your email system back in 4 hours, but you’re relying on last weeks backup tapes – is there much point? That customer query, or even worse order, will be lost. What you should be able to do is prioritise the different applications you run and their importance to your business. After that, it’s really a case of looking at the solution that matches what your requirements for each system. As the saying goes, it’s horses for courses and business continuity is no different.
Remember one size doesn’t fit all and be wary of any supplier who offers you only one type of solution.
Solutions
Firstly you may consider a purely reactive support or maintenance contract, which ensures you at least have someone to call should you have problems, but this offers no guarantees for recovery time.
Secondly, a dedicated Disaster Recovery contract gives you the peace of mind to know that should you lose any systems or data, hardware will be made available on a temporary basis to allow you to continue trading. A valuable extra is the ability to move into ‘standby’ offices – fully equipped, networked and with the relevant telecommunications in place should your premises be unavailable.
Lastly, for your most important systems you may want to consider replicating your data real-time. This is the best solution for continuity as your data will be available up to the time of failure (no waiting round for tapes to restore), there are many solutions available including Double Take Software.
This allows you to send your data via an existing network to another part of the building or offsite to another office in the company, or to a third party site. In this example, should you suffer a fire, flood or theft you at least know your data is secure.
The time taken to recover your servers is negligible compared to traditional methods, as you effectively have a ‘hot mirror’ available.
What you may want to consider is a mixture of the solutions outlined above to give you the best of all worlds.
This way you can be prepared should the worst happen.
Disaster Recovery – An Expensive luxury?
Has your business got a comprehensive Disaster Recovery plan in place or do you see it as an expensive luxury? Few people would doubt the benefit of house insurance yet many businesses skimp on something that could help the business survive a major outage.
Sorry, the server’s down, can you call back later? Part 1
Fed up of calling a company only to be told the system’s down? Even worse, has this happened to your company? This is terrible for business and you risk customers going elsewhere – so what do you do about it? Well firstly, don’t worry, help is at hand. Perform Risk & Business Impact Analysis to understand where the real problems are, then implement the right Business Continuity strategy for your business and your data.
