Unless your organization is in the business of recovering from events on a regular basis, businesses can lack the experience and know-how to plan, design and test recovery plans and recovery scenarios. Many companies develop one-time plans and put them on the shelf thinking they can pull them out in an emergency. But data growth, network changes, and application sprawl that occurs with running your business make it difficult to implement a plan that has gone stale.
Below are some key learnings to keep in mind as you develop a recovery plan:
In a time of chaos, employees are typically caught up in reacting to the disaster and taking care of their families. Some may have had damage to their homes and may have to evacuate.
Using traditional onsite backups can be risky if that is your only means to restoring data. Backup tapes can be lost or damaged. Providers who house tapes offsite can be challenged getting them to your business due to road conditions.
Disaster recovery planners require wide peripheral vision to be able to see beyond the recovery of the technology in the data center. Often times, key third parties are missed who provide a key function such as outsourced business processing centers.
With the greater volume of infrastructure and application changes, relying on outdated testing puts your recovery at risk. Even testing just a subset of applications limits understanding whether RPO and RTOs can be achieved.
Ensuring that advance data storage, transmission and management protocols are used with 256-bit AES encryption for stored files, SSL encryption for files in transit, and role-based permissions are implemented are key in your production and DR location.
Having a robust change management and documentation process is key to any successful business recovery in the event of a complete outage. Ensure that technical configurations and business process changes are approved and executed against critical business applications, and components of the infrastructure. It is of the utmost importance that these changes are also reflected in the documentation used and referenced in the event of a disaster.
At SIS, we offer customers a spectrum of recovery options and services. We have seen the value to our customers of programmatic recovery planning and execution. Nothing forces a customer to understand their recovery plan better than having a scheduled recovery test with a service provider. Our team of project managers, engineers and architects work with you to evaluate options for your recovery based on a business impact assessment, recovery points and recovery time objectives.
When you need to resume business within minutes of a disaster, SIS provides a service where you can replicate your data from your location to the SIS Managed Solution Center data centers. This service provides you with transactional data replication on an individual VM (Cloud) or LPAR (iSeries) basis. We assist you with the setup configuration on the originating and target location. Unlike other providers, we will help you get up-and-running, as well as test to validate the architecture delivers your RPO/RTO.
SIS provides backup capacity based on your workloads, change rates and retention schedules. We can help manage your backups, or if you want to be in control, we can provide the mechanism to manage your capacities in our cloud. We include a local appliance which acts as your repository with all backups being replicated daily, including variable retention schedules.
Need to reduce your recovery costs or have some lower recovery time objectives? Recovery on demand might be right for you if just need a defined environment where you can recover to meet audit requirements, or if you want to know that you have a place in line for your system recovery.
For more information, visit ThinkSIS.com.
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