What is Disaster Recovery?

First – What is a Disaster?

In short – When your computing infrastructure is rendered partially or wholly inoperable, and, as a consequence, the organisation cannot function normally. ‘Disaster’ is an emotive term that conjures images of Fire, Flood and the sky falling in! Real life scenarios are much less dramatic and unfortunately much more frequent, but the consequences are no less damaging to the operational capability of an organisation. Although we think about the probability of a fire or a terrorist attack - you are 50 times more at risk from the Digger driver in the street outside your office who inadvertently rips out your power and telephone lines, or fractures a gas or water main; or from prolonged failure of the Air Conditioning unit in your server room, which is one of the most frequent causes of ‘total loss’ instances. You can always test this for yourself – turn off the Air Conditioning and see how long YOU can stand the heat in your server room – but please be careful!

At a much more mundane level, we have all experienced power outages, server failures, disk crashes, virus attacks and data corruption, which at the time, you probably described in more colourful terms as a ‘disaster’ -  if you couldn’t recover the situation within an acceptable time for the business.

Why do organisations engage a professional Disaster Recovery Services company?
In short – it’s an insurance policy by any other name.  They have decided on the degree of risk they are prepared to live with and have defined a Recovery Time Objective for complete resumption of operational capability within the framework of a DR contract. This recovery process is well rehearsed and frequently tested to accommodate disruptions from minor failures to ‘total loss’ disasters.  The DR Plan will include a scalable model - from simple data and server recovery, right up to a full scale replacement of the entire server estate at an alternative site, and the possible relocation of essential staff to a fully equipped office.

‘Hope’ is not a strategy
Without a well rehearsed and stress tested recovery plan, you are relying on a strategy of ‘Hope’. Thankfully such ‘disaster’ events are infrequent; but by its very nature a ‘disaster’ is utterly disruptive. Dependent upon the scale of the disruption, you will be faced with an escalating degree of ‘undocumented chaos’, with a very limited estimate of the degree of financial risk to your business, or the ability to assure the business users as to when they can expect a partial or complete recovery. Without any planning or documented processes, your IT staff will have very little idea as to how to immediately react to the situation, or address the problems in an ordered prioritised approach.

What’s the Value of a Full Service DR Company like Covenco?
Primarily because Covenco engineers have seen just about every disruption you can imagine within a broad spectrum of organisations - hence they are ‘experts by experience’. But at Covenco there is much more than conventional DR. Every customer case study speaks of the unique value delivered in designing a complete end-to-end solution, beginning with the architecture and implementation of an efficient backup infrastructure, which in turn delivers a much more cost efficient DR infrastructure. Each implementation is designed to meet the expectations of individual customers, most of whom wish to manage their own local backup and recovery for everyday operations. This local data vault facility will then be replicated in real time to an off-site DR facility that will provide the ultimate assurance in case of a complete loss of access to any of the customer’s locations.

How do you decide on the most suitable backup & DR system?

The architecture of the backup solution will depend on a number of factors:

• Your Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives for prioritised servers, which will dictate whether you require a High Availability solution, or a hybrid of HA and D2D.
• The geographic spread of your organisation, with considerations for Local recovery, bandwidth between sites and consolidation to your HQ Data Vault facility.
• Your server environment – is it multi-platform? – is it partially or wholly Virtualised?
• Your data volumes at each location and long term data archiving requirements.
• Do you have a suitable off-site Data Centre that can function as your DR facility?
• Are you in a heavily regulated business sector, such as Finance, Banking, Insurance, Healthcare or Government?  In which case you must consider the high probability that you will need immediate access to historical data at any time during the mandated retention period.
• Do you have a large laptop user community? Is every laptop encrypted? How quickly can you replace a Laptop with all of the user’s data?
• Do you have the time and staff resources to manage the backup & DR infrastructure – or would you prefer to have everything managed by a professional DR company who can replace your hardware at a moment’s notice.

Which Backup Technology should I use?
Covenco have selected a range of different vendor’s technologies, which we have stress tested in extreme conditions.  Among this group, there is no ‘Best technology’ – we work on the principle of what is  ‘the most suitable and scalable technology’ for any given set of customer circumstances and expectations.

How do you estimate the return on investment?
Let’s be clear - DR is an overhead, it’s an insurance; apart from reducing your Consequential Loss insurance premiums, it adds no intrinsic value to the operational efficiency or profitability of your organisation – except on the day and hour that something catastrophic happens. At that moment it becomes the most valuable investment you’ve ever made and is probably worth the entire value of your company.