Disaster Recovery Planning Wales
Establishing business continuity metrics such as Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is critical in business continuity planning. Devoting attention to RTO and RPO is the only way to guarantee your organisation will still be able to operate in the event of a disaster. After all, when it comes to disaster recovery planning, do you want your business up and running quickly, but operating with data that’s a week or even a day old?
In today’s digital economy, Disaster Recovery (DR) is often synonymous with data recovery. Companies depend on information to operate. If a critical application goes down, business comes to a halt and revenue inevitably suffers. Companies that are complacent about DR planning take a huge risk: 50% of businesses that lose their data due to disasters go out of business within two years, while 93% of such businesses go under within five years.
Once the RTO and RPO metrics have been mapped to IT infrastructure, the DR planner can determine the most suitable recovery strategy for each system. An important note here however is that the business ultimately sets the IT budget and therefore the RTO and RPO metrics need to fit with the available budget. While most business unit heads would like zero data loss and zero time loss, the cost associated with that level of protection may make the desired high availability solutions unpractical.
The following is a list of the most common strategies for data protection.
Backups made to tape and sent off-site at regular intervals (preferably daily) Backups made to disk on-site and automatically copied to off-site disk, or made directly to off-site disk Replication of data to an off-site location. High availability systems which keep both the data and system replicated off-site, enabling continuous access to systems and data
In many cases, an organization may elect to use an outsourced disaster recovery provider to provide a stand-by site and systems rather than using their own remote facilities.
In addition to preparing for the need to recover systems, organizations must also implement precautionary measures with an objective of preventing a disaster situation in the first place. These may include some of the following:
Local mirrors of systems and/or data and use of disk protection technology such as RAID Surge Protectors – to minimize the effect of power surges on delicate electronic equipment Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) and/or Backup Generator to keep systems going in the event of a power failure Fire Preventions – more alarms, accessible fire extinguishers Anti-virus software and other security measures
For more information visit http://www.microssit.co.uk.
By: Micross
About the Author:
visit http://www.microssit.co.uk for more information.
Micross IT is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, a Sage developer and Sage business partner and a Cisco SMB Select Partner.

