Did you know that 53% of organisations can tolerate less than an hour of downtime before they experience a significant revenue loss or other adverse business impact? This has massive implications, regardless of which type of company you have.
Today businesses are generating an explosion of data that is residing on increasingly diverse storage mediums. Disaster recovery adds redundancy and peace of mind. By choosing a quality disaster recovery service, you can relax with the knowledge that even in the case of a massive IT failure, your sensitive data and even your infrastructure is protected through off-site storage. Yet despite how easy and versatile disaster recovery has become, less than 50% of companies are sufficiently backing up their data.
There are different levels of data recovery:
- No disaster recovery plan but good backup procedures
- A disaster recovery plan but no backup of physical infrastructure
- A “cold site” disaster recovery plan
- A “split site” disaster recovery plan
- A “warm site” disaster recovery plan
- A “hot site” disaster recovery plan
No disaster recovery plan but good backup procedures
This is the bare minimum required by companies if they want a shot at not losing all their data in case of disaster. All data must be backed up on reliable tools and stored at a secure off-site location. Backups should be done regularly, at least daily. Should your hardware and software be damaged or destroyed, you can replace it and physically (and painstakingly) reload the backed up data onto the new systems. Make sure that the backup procedures are fault tolerant – reloading backed up data that is corrupt or irretrievable defeats the purpose.
A disaster plan but no physical infrastructure in place
Once your backup system is running smoothly and effectively, you need to consider remote disaster recovery. This aims at successful disaster recovery even if the hardware and physical infrastructure are completely destroyed. In such a case, you’ll need to source (temporary) resources such as computers from another division or external supplier. Although another step in the right direction, this still means that you will need to source equipment, so you’ll have hours if not days of downtime.
“Cold site” disaster recovery plan
A cold site is an area on a data centre which you can reserve for setting up new equipment in case of disaster. Less expensive than the options to follow, cold site disaster recovery plans are quite popular, as they still provide companies the ability to weather a disaster without losing all data. This is the method usually adopted by third parties that handle the outsourcing of disaster recovery. Extensive down-time is still applicable as a con for this option.
In Part 2 of this article, we’ll look at some more sophisticated types of disaster recovery plans.
