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di•sas•ter: noun - A sudden calamitous event bringing great damage, loss, or destruction.
Disasters, either natural or man-made, can occur at any time, threatening your ability to keep doing business. Unless your company is protected, disasters can be difficult to recover from and impossible to work through.
With The Computer Hut's Disaster Recovery services, your business will have the plans and resources in place to recover quickly from a disaster and get back to business immediately.
Depending on your organization’s Recovery Time Objective (RTO), Virtualization technologies can be a key component of your disaster recovery plan. By utilizing Virtualization, hardware costs for recovery systems are not doubled and testing can become a part of your ongoing disaster recovery solution. Virtualizing your target servers give you greater simplicity, reliability, and cost savings over traditional disaster recovery solutions.
Critical business data, including business proposals, e-mails, accounts receivable, current data and applications will be securely backed up offsite (remote backup servers are replicated for redundancy) and quickly restorable to your existing location or to a different site using new hardware. Your plan and preparation will be routinely evaluated and updated as your business needs or environment change.
The Disaster Recovery plan describes how an organization will deal with a disaster and consists of the precautions taken so that the effects of a disaster will be minimized and the organization will be able to either maintain or quickly resume mission-critical functions. Typically, disaster recovery planning involves an analysis of business processes and continuity needs; it may also include a significant focus on disaster prevention. Two fundamental hurdles must be overcome when planning for disaster recovery.
First, you must realize that the seemingly large variety of possible disasters can actually be reduced to a manageable number. Most disasters can be grouped into one or more of only three categories. These are loss of information, loss of access, and loss of personnel.
The second hurdle to overcome is in accepting the fact that "business-as-usual" will be suspended at the time of the disaster. There will be two time periods which must be planned for following a disaster:
1. Limited-operations: the immediate, disorganized time immediately following a disaster usually extending for a week or more.
2. Makeshift-operations: the following period of time that can last for several months until normal operations are restored.
The objective of the planning process is to systematically sort out the various issues and priorities so that a cost-effective plan can be developed which is in perspective to the level of loss exposure which the organization is risking. The process itself can be summarized in the following steps:
- provide top-management guidelines
- identify serious risks
- prioritize the operations to be maintained and how to maintain them
- assign the disaster team
- take a complete inventory
- know where to get help
- document the plan
- review with key employees, test the plan, and train all employees
Your recovery plan will be comprehensive and cover details which are company-wide in scope, such as:
- protecting life
- minimizing risk to the company
- recovery of critical applications
- safeguarding against litigation
- protecting competitive positions
- preserving customer confidence
As you can see, there is a lot more to disaster recovery than simply backing up your data, although that is extremely vital as well. The Computer Hut can assist your organization in developing a Disaster Recovery Plan that is right for your business.
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