In the era of digital information, the ability to resume business operations following a natural or technical disaster depends largely on the strategy used to restore hardware, software and critical data.
Data protection is offered in a variety of service levels of different scope. What suits a medium-sized business may not be sufficient to safeguard the data of a large corporation with
remote and branch offices. While developing a disaster recovery strategy is not by necessity exhaustive and costly, it does require foresight as well as a thorough evaluation of your organization's unique operational requirements.
How To Develop A Disaster Recovery Strategy
A logical progression exists in the development of a strategy to resume business operations following a disaster that results in a loss of business-critical data and/or information services.
- Business Impact Assessment - Consider the impact of a service outage for mission-critical systems. How will the window required to restore lost data affect your organization's bottom line? The Business Impact Assessment (BIA) identifies the critical systems and assesses the economic impact of disasters resulting in at least temporary lack of access to those systems. Additionally, this assessment should provide an accurate estimate of how long your organization can continue to operate without access to information systems and services affected by a disaster.
- Establish Recovery Objectives - Your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum window to restore a system or service following a disaster. Bear in mind that individual RTOs must be congruent with limiting factors affecting those windows, for example, a server data restore objective assumes the presence of an operational hardware facility. The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the point in time which your data will reflect once your services are brought back online, and is dictated by the level of your data protection. (Did you know that you can reduce your RPO dramatically with CRC's Continuous Data Protection?)
- Design a Recovery Plan - Your organization, having identified the impact of various disaster scenarios, should develop a strategy that mitigates the business disruption caused by the disaster. In the area of data protection, your disaster recovery plan must include a strategy to backup and restore data within a specific timeframe dictated by your recovery objectives. (True protection against disaster means offsite protection of data for maximum fault tolerance.) Additionally your Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) must include a cost vs. benefits analysis that ensures the selection of the most practical solution for your organization's IT budget.
Superior Disaster Recovery Strategy with Online Backup for SMBs & Enterprises
A good DRP takes into account many different factors. IT managers must take into account the various risks that can adversely impact business operations while attempting to address the budget concerns inherent in protecting growing stores of critical data. CRC DataProtection Enterprise Data Backup & Recovery addresses the concerns of SMB IT managers surveying the landscape of managed disaster recovery services, and does so with simple, affordable solutions. Delivering Enterprise-class fault tolerance and data protection at price points far more accessible to SMB industries, CRC delivers secure, reliable service with the ability to lower recovery objective windows, while simultaneously reducing the overall cost of administering a disaster recovery strategy compared to traditional tape methods.
