DATA, NETWORK & APPLICATION MANAGEMENT

Disaster Recovery (DR) is a set of procedures, policies, and/or processes that enable the recovery or continuation of an organisation’s vital technology infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster. Having the right disaster recovery plan for your organisation is essential for business continuity.

The planning involved in disaster recovery is a deep-dive into your security measures to define business-critical data and applications. With the right DR plan, you can minimise interruptions to normal operations and incur minimal costs to resume operations after a disaster.

You can also train your people with emergency procedures, and establish alternative means of operation in advance to limit the extent of disruption and damage.

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM DISASTER RECOVERY SOLUTIONS?

Recent times have taught us that disasters can strike in different forms, not just cyber threats or equipment failure. Natural disasters like hurricanes, storms, etc. can take out power and internet connectivity for days, weeks, and even months. Ransomware, civil disturbances, mass shootings, terrorism, and even simple human errors can slowdown or shutdown businesses anywhere. And now even pandemics can bring the entire world to a shuddering halt.

In order to be ready for such unpredictable situations, your enterprise needs to put together an adequate BC/DR plan, supported by the different BC/DR solutions found in the market nowadays.

Remember, DR is more than simply restoring files from backups.

The best DR solutions combine flexible backup with a comprehensive disaster recovery platform to support business continuity on-premise as well as on the cloud, and encompass your applications and data.

When choosing your disaster recovery solution, you have to first know your recovery point objective (RPO) and your recovery time objective (RTO). Note that you may have different RTO and RPO numbers for different applications.

The RPO and RTO aspects of a DR strategy are defined by what you choose as your priority applications and data. As a rule, the shorter the recovery point and recovery time objectives, the higher the cost of DR infrastructure. Remember, you also need to make sure that you understand the underlying costs. For example, if you want an SAP instance to have a failover, you will need to procure the infrastructure, licenses, tools, and other associated products and services in order to keep your DR systems current and ready to failover. 

Next, you have to mind your compliance requirements as well. You will also need to decide what level of backups are available for your backup systems. And your failover site needs the same type of IT security in place as the rest of your network, including firewalls, encryption, identity and access management, intrusion prevention, etc.

Once you have your DR set up, you also need to test it, and the industry standard for DR tests is twice a year. In addition to the standard failover tests, you also need to perform stress, load, and performance tests on your production and DR infrastructure to make sure they are adequate for the expected user and request load. 

Sounds complicated?

HOW IVALUE CAN HELP?

At iValue, we will work with you to design and deploy the right BC/DR recovery plan for your organisation, whether disasters strike in the form of cyber attacks, equipment failure, hurricanes, pandemic, or any other natural disasters. And it all starts with identifying the mission-critical IT components and services that you, your users, clients, and network need for business continuity.

We can combine internal resources and vendor-supported solutions in your Disaster Recovery planning to maximise efficacy and minimise costs. And we will ensure your failover policy is fully in-line with the synchronisation method of your choice. Moreover, we can even monitor system health and reroute traffic in real-time to a backup data center in the event of failure.

The team at iValue will support your organisational needs to keep your business going, no matter what.