For a business, disasters come in all shapes and sizes: a downed server, power outage, flood, fire, and even a plague of frogs. But while all of these have varied consequences, especially the frogs, each one shares a common theme – they put your data at risk.
If you haven’t already, an important subject that all businesses need to learn about is business continuity and disaster recovery. Or, simply, BC/DR. DR is exactly as it sounds and is a measure of your ability and time spent recovering from threats that affect the way you operate. Minutes, hours, days…it all matters since time is measured in revenue loss. Business continuity is your ability to continue critical operations, address customers, and provide users with services – even in or during an adverse event or a disaster.
Traditional backup and recovery technologies are not serving businesses anymore in the needs of the modern data center. Really, what the conversation should be about is data and service availability. Ensuring that end-users can access the services and applications that they need to continue business operations, and ensuring that data – the lifeblood of the organization – is protected and accessible, is the real measure of business resiliency.
What we’re finding is that convergence in the data center, software defined technologies, and cloud have brought to organizations all types new options for data protection, disaster recovery, and business continuity that have never been as widely available or as affordable. This is very exciting for everyone involved. But it can also provide a landscape that can be very confusing or very challenging as businesses are now forced to look at the whole picture and ask:
• Should I continue with a traditional backup/recovery strategy or should I be looking for a more integrated data protection plus DR solution?
• What about the various options for replication, failover, and clustering?
• Do I need to have a hot site or a colocation facility?
Those three questions alone present a lot of available options. All of these challenges and opportunities can be better overcome when you work with a trusted advisor to make sure that these options have been evaluated and the best fit for your specific business requirements. In our experience we have found that while many best practices, approaches, and patterns tend to repeat across industries, each customer also inherently has particular requirements based on that customer’s unique characteristics – whether it be geography, business strategy, competitive environment, and on. And that’s exactly why we offer a Converged Data Center Practice – to help guide customers toward those solutions so they can build the appropriate fit for disaster recovery and business continuity based on the best technology available.
Our Converged Data Center Practice provides a consulting methodology that we have actually built in-house with our deep experience working with organizations and customers of all sizes in all different types of disaster recovery and business continuity challenges over the course of the 35 years we’ve been in business.
We’ve developed a five step disaster recovery roadmap that begins with a business impact assessment, moves through a business continuity plan, and helps develop a disaster recovery policy – which is to say the business requirements that surround that disaster recovery need from a perspective of recovery point objectives, recovery time objectives, and service level agreements within the organization. From there, we’ll help design the actual technology to support that disaster recovery policy, implement it, and custom tailor a disaster recovery plan. Better yet, this disaster recovery plan is both the implementation of that technology that’s been designed to support the business requirements and also a lifecycle of testing, validation, and improvement to ensure that that disaster recovery plan will function when that company needs it. That complete lifecycle helps to ensure that the plan will work when you need it.
We are always here to help if you need us!
