A staggering 53% of organisations can tolerate less than an hour of downtime before they experience a significant revenue loss or other adverse business impact. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance to have a sufficient disaster recovery measure in place.
Should disaster strike, the data you have on all your storage mediums are at risk. A proper disaster recovery plan will add 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 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
In Part 1 of this article, we looked at a recovery when there is no actual disaster recovery plan but where good backup procedures are in place, as well as a disaster recovery plan involving no planning for physical infrastructure. Let’s have a look at some more involved, sophisticated data recovery measures.
Consider the following to ensure you have the protection you need:
Planning: Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – RPO is the maximum period tolerable in which data could be lost. RTO is the target time for resumption of IT activities after disaster occurs. These are two of the most important considerations for your disaster recovery plans.
“Split site” disaster recovery plan
A split site disaster recovery plan is when the IT department of a company is housed in more than one location. Should one of the sites be compromised due to a disaster, the decommissioned site’s operations can simply move to the other site and continue there. Data backups can be restored (bearing in mind that the same rules for backing up data as set out in the first option is maintained). A pro for this option is that operations can be resumed near-seamlessly and it’s less expensive than having to build and maintain a dedicated disaster centre. While this “warm” site still needs to be maintained, costs can be off-set against the operational costs that would have been incurred anyway as well as the money and time saved in the speed and ease of disaster recovery.
“Hot site” disaster recovery plan
This is the Rolls-Royce of disaster recovery plans, in that the company’s business systems and up-to-date data are duplicated and stored at a separate off-site data centre. The duplicate infrastructure is set up in a remote location and data is backed up continuously via communication lines that have been set up. This means that the data is up-to-date and in real-time all the time. The site contains a duplicate server of each of the company’s critical servers. The top end of these plans even include infrastructure such as office furniture and equipment.
To ensure complete and utter thoroughness in data recovery, a third set of backups should always be in the cloud. The hot site might also be compromised as it cannot be too far from the company’s main site; or disaster might be widespread. In a case like this, the data is safe in the cloud and can simply be download and recovered as soon as you have access to either new of virtualised infrastructure.
