Disaster Recovery planning - what are your options?

What is disaster recovery?

Disaster recovery (DR) refers to IT technologies and best practices that prevent or minimise data loss and business disruption caused by serious events. These events are significant enough to disrupt or completely stop critical business operations for a period of time. The common causes of this are:

• Hardware failure (55%)
• Human error (22%)
• Software failure (18%)
• Natural Disaster (5%)

The goal of DR is to allow the organisation to regain the use of critical systems and IT infrastructure as soon as possible after a disaster occurs. Organisations will conduct an in-depth analysis of their systems to prepare for this and create a formal document to follow in times of crisis. This is referred to as a disaster recovery plan.

DSP-Explorer provides disaster recovery services to secure, modernise, and ultimately, keep your database and business running. Before you read on, check out our DR services and find out how we can help you.

Why do you need disaster recovery?

Disaster recovery helps businesses to recover lost data. Every business should have a DR plan so that if their servers fail, they can recover lost data from another location, where it has been backed up.

However, many companies don't have a DR plan, due to the perception that it's time-consuming and expensive to establish and maintain. But really, this is a false economy. Without a DR plan, companies are at risk, and vulnerable to the consequences of significant disruptive events. DR plans can save businesses from huge financial losses and mean the difference between an incident being inconvenient or catastrophic. In 2014, data loss and downtime cost businesses worldwide $1.7 trillion, and in the last 12 months, 64% of businesses have suffered from some sort of disruption. 

Furthermore, with a plan in place, businesses can recover much faster after a disaster occurs, or they may even be able to continue operations as if nothing has happened. More than 40% of small businesses will not re-open after experiencing a disaster, and of those that do, an additional 25% will fail within the first year after the crisis. Disaster recovery planning can significantly reduce these risks.

The most serious consequences of data loss are:

• Reduced employee activity
• Loss of revenue
• Interruptions to product/service development
• Damage to new business opportunities
• A decline in customer loyalty

What are your options for disaster recovery?

There are three disaster recovery configuration models available: on-premises, cloud, and hybrid. All have benefits and drawbacks, so let's discuss and you can decide which option is best for you and your business.

On-Premises

An on-premises DR solution is where your production environment is located at the same site as your secondary DR systems.

Advantages:

• Infrastructure and data are readily accessible without internet access
• On-site servers give you more control over your server, with backup processes updated as needed to meet the needs of the business
• Strong data security and protection. Company data is private because it is all stored internally, and you have complete ownership of the data (this is ideal for finance or public sector companies, where they have greater security concerns)
• Data is quicker to restore as it is located at the primary site
• Lower latency when a disaster happens or when you need to recover files, as it's faster to access on-premises systems 

Disadvantages:

• Need to have the capacity to back up your systems and data and maintain these backups in an on-site data centre
• Because the data is on the same premises, it is vulnerable to data centre-specific disasters, such as fires, floods, or cyber-attacks
• The initial upfront cost is very high, and you have the added costs of maintenance, management, IT support, labour and hardware
• There is limited scalability as the organisation grows
• Must ensure that your DR strategy meets all required compliance requirements

Cloud

Third-party providers (such as DSP-Explorer) provide disaster recovery in the cloud, which ensures business continuity by replicating your systems and data to a private or public cloud infrastructure and managing the failover and failback process when a disaster occurs. Visit our disaster recovery services page to learn more about how we can assist you with cloud-based DR.

Advantages:

• Third-party providers will manage your backups and orchestrate the backup, failover, and failback services in a secure data centre
• IT teams can focus on other business functions rather than DR planning, testing, and execution
• You only have to pay for what you use rather than investing large sums of money, and there are no onsite hardware building costs
• Easily connect to the cloud from anywhere, using any device
• Scalable to the growth of your business

Disadvantages:

• There must be enough network bandwidth and throughput capability between the primary site and the cloud to ensure data can be replicated without too much lag and to be able to recover data back to the primary site once the issue is resolved
• An internet connection is needed to access company data
• Less control over your data, as it sits outside your private network
• Running applications from the cloud rather than onsite may cause performance problems if there is increased latency
• Licensing can be quite a complex issue, and you need to ensure your environment is entirely compliant

Hybrid

A hybrid DR solution is a mix of the two above models. Organisations can run their workload in both on-premises and third-party data centres.

Advantages:

• You have all the benefits of the cloud, but your data remains on-premises
• Better data integrity because backups can exist both off-site and on-site, which provides a fail-safe in the event that one of the backups is compromised
• Better for compliance because businesses can control how and where data is replicated and encrypted. Sensitive data can be kept on-site, while the rest is stored in the cloud
• You can scale the resources up and down as required
• You can reduce what you have on-premises which reduces the costs and maintenance of those environments 

Disadvantages:

• IT teams need skills and knowledge of cloud solution
• Sufficient network capacity is required
• It has the longest recovery time
• Data isn’t all in one place, which makes it difficult to replicate workloads and meet recovery point and time objectives (these are critical to DR)
• When your data is both on-premises and in the cloud, it is equivalent to running two separate data centres, so you must be more prepared if one of them fails

All three solutions have advantages and disadvantages, but it is up to you to determine which one is best for your company. The most important thing is to have a plan in place so that you are completely prepared if disaster strikes.

If you want to find out more, join us for our webinar with Dbvisit to discuss why disaster recovery is so important for your company and the steps you need to take next to ensure you have the right systems in place if disaster strikes.

You can also get in touch with our experts today for the services and support you need to implement a disaster recovery solution that’s right for your business. You can also book a meeting…