Investing upfront in the mitigation of potential disasters will save your company and network in the long run. Disaster recovery solutions enable business continuity, help your firm to avoid the headaches of retrieving loss data, and save you from devastating recovery costs. Read on as we delve into exactly why it is worth investing in a disaster recovery plan.
What is disaster recovery?
According to TechTarget, “disaster recovery is an area of security planning that aims to protect an organization from the effects of significant negative events. Disaster recovery allows an organization to maintain or quickly resume mission-critical functions following a disaster.” This means that implementing disaster recovery requires a different approach for every business, as each firm has its own mission-critical functions. Some vital functions rely on IT infrastructure, so it is a good idea to look at disaster recovery solutions within that context. However, disaster recovery should always be a part of business continuity planning as a whole.
Some important questions to ask when you are planning and designing your mission-critical infrastructure include:
- How much time am I prepared to have my essential functions unavailable?
- How much data am I prepared to lose? (For example, if you safely backup your data once a day, you should be okay with losing up to one day’s worth of information if disaster strikes.)
- How much money will it cost my business when the mission-critical services are not available?
Disaster recovery for common failures
Most MSPs offer some form of disaster recovery services for common mishaps such as failure of a physical disk, server, network switch, network uplink connection, or power feed. A redundant setup works to solve the issue of one element failing, as another piece of the infrastructure should be able to take its place. Redundant networking devices and cabling, multiple power feeds, seamless failover to battery power, and separate power generators play an important role in keeping your IT infrastructure running. This means that there will be minimal – if any – interruption to your everyday software and services. One of the most common practices used in disaster recovery is to create a frequent backup copy of your important data. That way, if a disaster occurs, you can restore your backup and relaunch your mission-critical functions and other services. For a faster relaunch of your services after a disaster, replication of your application servers and data can prove useful since traditional backups call for more time to be restored.
Preparing for critical disasters
To mitigate the risks of larger disasters, an alternative IT infrastructure environment can help you to run your mission-critical functions for business continuity’s sake. Some firms choose to backup vital data to another location, while others replicate servers and data to another site like the cloud. This enables a quick relaunch of applications with little to no interruption to your services.
In the event that you have to mitigate the risk of failure of the entire environment, you may consider including a failover data center site in your IT infrastructure setup. Disaster recovery by means of adding an alternative data center requires a tailored approach to identify the right setup for your company’s applications and important information.
Another important factor to consider is that you should be implementing applications that can deal with infrastructure failures. In the past, it was more acceptable to trust the underlying infrastructure of applications. However, modern day businesses are now implementing applications in such a way that regardless of their cheaper, less stable underlying infrastructure, an application failure will not impact the availability of mission-critical functions.
Making the most of your investment
To make the most of your investment in disaster recovery, you can choose to use extra resources located in a second data center even when there is no failover from a large disaster in the primary data center location. You can spread workloads between both data centers, for example, with half of the workloads running in each center. If disaster strikes, non-critical services can be halted to make space for mission-critical services to failover. You could also choose to run all of your applications in the primary data center and only have essential functions replicate and fail over to the second data center.
If you find yourself confused or intimidated by the process of disaster recovery, it might be time to take your concerns to the experts. Here at Contigo, we have disaster recovery solutions that work for your business by placing your data in secure locations and ensuring it is there when you need it most. Through our system of multi-copy backups, custom retention policies, business continuity plans, and daily audits, we are able to do exactly what you need us to do: keep your data safe and sound. Contact us today to learn more.