Technology options are removing obstacles to DR protection

 

It was common to come across many businesses without disaster recovery plans and provision. I am sure this is still apply today. Truly, there is no excuse nowadays!

There have been strong emphasises impelling organisations towards effective disaster recovery planning.  This can be in form of legal and regulatory compliance. Financial services, for example, have prescribed levels of disaster recovery in place. Regulations from UK Financial Services Authority dictate the standard of disaster recovery expected. The bottom line, in financial trading, milliseconds are worth millions of Pounds. If financial services company that does not resume trading within seconds of an outage will loss money and reputation. Damage to the organisation reputation is not only loss money from unrecoverable trade also devalue company ‘s share. This could be devastated result in short and long term.

Enough of the doom and gloom, the fact remains that there are compelling push factors driving the need for a sound disaster recovery strategy. The good news is that there are some attractive pull factors that make disaster recovery potentially easier, less costly and less of a management headache that it has even been.

Once upon a time, an effective disaster recovery strategy meant that your secondary IT setup needed to be a carbon copy of your primary data centre. This was because applications tied to one physical server. Server virtualisation broken this link. Now, bare-metal restore on any device is possible. In fact, mirroring in real time or near real time can enable failover to standby estate in minutes or seconds. The cloud takes theme to further logical conclusions. The provision of computer and storage facilities remotely by cloud provider, private or public, has been the buzz phrase in IT for the past couple of years. Cloud disaster recovery offers remote resources to which replicate data. In the event of an outage occur, your company’s employees can work from the cloud while the primary IT site facilities are restored. It’s early days but at some point this could be the standard by which all work – security and bandwidth permitting.

Having said all that, there is one area of disaster recovery has not necessarily gotten any easier. And that is the need to analyse risk, develop detailed plans, test, train and continuously update the disaster recovery strategy plan. We are happy to assist and guide you towards achieving these tasks.

 

If you need further information or initial consultancy, please email mustafa@imexservices.co.uk for details.