Disasters can include everything from natural disasters, to hardware failures and software corruption or simply human error – all of which can have a devastating impact to normal business operations.
Anyone who has actually managed a business’ recovery from a disaster knows that the most critical factor when it comes to business and operation continuity is having a plan in place before the disaster strikes. While disaster recovery will always involve some on-fly decision making and adapting to realities on the ground, both of these can be made orders of magnitude easier by having contingency plans and systems already in place, and staff who are already trained how to implement them. That sounds great, but it’s a daunting task if you are starting from scratch
Disaster preparedness means having, at the very least, the data and apps that are required to keep day-to-day operations already running in a remote location and ready to access. It also means having trained end-users how to access that in-place, contingent data so they can continue to get to the systems they need, whether they are working on company-issued machines or their own mobile devices.
In short, IT contingency in wake of emergencies should be as seamless, as compliant with corporate security policies, and as easy for end-users to access as possible
Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity:
DR and BC – Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity – are two of IT’s often unmentioned off-spring that might have been thought to have gained a new and accepted place in the scheme of IT management by the advent of the cloud.
It is true that cloud service providers can now provide DR as an all-but free by-product of the service – on the basis that if they cannot recover quickly from service disruption they will soon be dead in the water. But the flexibility of the cloud means that users are faced with several decisions to make on the type of DR required. In practice, of course, many businesses are not trained to think about such issues, as their standard approach to DR and BC is to gamble that it will never be needed and so save the cost of expensive DR/BC solutions.
And the decisions – which need to be driven by the basic question `what are my recovery objectives’ – are now starting to become more numerous, nuanced and policy-oriented as the cloud makes it easier to both add and exploit analytical tools. These now examine the many potential problems that can affect the continuity of business and, worst case, can create a disaster from which recovery is essential.
The world had moved on considerably with regard to DR/BC, from the days when there might be one back up taken over night. Now backups can be taken in a number of different ways and time frequencies. This is just one area where the service consumer now gets to choice the type and frequency of backup which best meets their requirements.
The analytics component adds a whole new level of granularity to the decision making process because of the information that can provided. At its crudest level this is can simply be monitoring the systems or services to ensure that the user is getting the level of service they have signed up for. In BC terms this alone can be critical information, and is an example of how analytics can prevent problems becoming Problems.
Knowing that a service level is degrading; allows users to act appropriately in advance of the situation having a direct impact on the performance of the systems and, through that, the performance of the business.
In an emergency, you want the restoration process to be seamless, so consider options like disk-to-disk backup over tape, to improve the speed of data restoration. Your IT provider needs to regularly test your backup as well, and slower mediums like tape can make that expensive and time consuming.
Of course, if your backup is sitting at the office during a fire, it won’t do you much good. Employing an off-site data backup service at a secure, reliable data-center will ensure that no matter what happens to your business, your data is protected. Often, in the event of a disaster, you can have complete access to your data the next day. This puts you back to a “business as usual” status faster.
If your data doesn’t get recovered, you will realize that building your data back up and dealing with the disruption causes your business both time and money.
Are you looking to establish a bullet-proof Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and disaster recovery system for your business?
Contact us today at +91 9745550277 and ask us about our backup solutions for small and medium-sized businesses.
You may also send your inquiries to sales@noconsolutions.com / arun@noconsolutions.com