Archive for the ‘Disaster recovery’ Category

By Brian Bloom

Disaster recovery plans are a series of steps you take to repair damage and carry on. But a DR plan won’t work when you have no time to rebuild, says a recent report by Forrester Research.

The goal today is 100% uptime. But how do you get there? According to the analyst firm, IT infrastructure has to be constructed from the ground up to be resilient.

In a report Move beyond disaster recovery and prepare for business technology resiliency, Forrester decries what it says is an outdated concept of leaving DR to storage professionals and argues it should be replaced by a comprehensive, company-wide strategy: business technology resiliency.

If ever a programme was designed to run in the cloud, it surely has to be disaster recovery and business continuity. Private external hosting aside, such a package would be pretty useless if it was stored on the server that had fallen apart, or in a building that had just gone up in smoke.

But there are issues; two, in fact. The first is that too few small and mid-sized businesses actually have any significant disaster recovery plan in operation. The second is too many are still wary of the cloud.

How do you use the cloud? Have you embraced it and does it live up to expectations? Or are you still looking for the offerings and packages that will provide all the cost benefits and simplicity promised?

“The cloud has so many different offerings, but only some are realistic now,” wrote David Jackson from Ontario, Canada on this forum as he searched for a cloud-based backup solution for remote offices.

How can a small business establish a viable disaster recovery plan? And how much of a role should the cloud play in that?

That was the essence of a lively discussion that took place on this forum after Andrew Clark, director at Edinburgh-based Pearl Computer Associates asked: “I need a disaster recovery plan for an SME. Can anyone suggest a structure/ methodology for developing one?”

It depends on what other packages are running, said Raymond France. “A lot of the backup software now come with disaster recovery options built in,” he said.

Tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, wildfire, floods, ash clouds… they have all hit the headlines over recent weeks. Which proves it’s always better to expect the unexpected.

No more so than when it comes to disaster recovery and business continuity. While many of these natural disasters do not directly affect the ability of businesses to function, smaller scale upsets can leave a firm floundering.

You can’t protect yourself from every disaster, but you can mitigate potential damage by taking a few up-front steps to ensure your data, at least, remains safe and secure.