Squeeze >> Technology >> Recovery and Business Continuity
Ensuring your business can recover from disaster and enabling business continuity
Recovery and Business Continuity address how your organization will act in the event of specific disaster scenarios. These scenarios can range from relatively minor such as a hard drive failure in one of your servers, to a server room flood, a loss of external connectivity to a fire that destroys everything.
It is very hard to plan for all scenarios without unlimited budgets. Therefore the important ones to your business should be selected first and these will be dictated by what systems you run and how long you can stay in business without them.
Your plans should encompass in an ideal world , backup and restore, recovery planning for each critical component or application, failover arrangements for data pipes and a testing plan that is revisited every six months to ensure it is still up to date and applicable.
The Basics
All organizations should be backing up their verified data regularly as the bare minimum, though many don't do it. Having a data backup provides peace of mind but you must consider what are you going to do with that data in the event of a disaster?
To improve on the situation, you must consider backing up your key operating system platforms along with the data. Once you are doing this, the question must be raised, how will you use this backup? Has it been tested? What will you restore it to if the original hardware has failed or the site is unavailable?
Virtualization and Business Continuity
Virtualization can deliver improved business continuity by removing the mapping between production and disaster recovery hardware - it can therefore answer cost effectively some of the answers posed above. Virtualization can be used to provide high levels of continuity even if multiple physical servers are unavailable.
Squeeze Technology will provide guidance and design and deliver your DR solutions and ensure they are managed for the future - whether you have a small system that just requires a backup solution and a tested recovery process, or if your business require a more complex and in depth plan that will meet multiple disaster scenarios.
