STORAGE
Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery
Do you have a run applications on bare metal?
Is your IT infrastructure entirely Virtual?
Do you want to use tape backups? Is backup to disk your strategy?
OVERVIEW
How it Works
Today’s modern IT Operations are complex and your organization is highly dependent on those processes to ensure the business operates smoothly. IT operations can be Accounts Payable / Receivable Client Billing order processing or quote generation. Patient care, customer care records keeping everyone informed of important information. There are many inter-dependent systems: databases, a web front end or an application that crunches numbers, BUT what drives these highly dependent applications? Many servers and shared storage run to deliver these expected outcomes. Today’s system administrator is charged to ensure uptime availability, performance, security, manageability and the often forgotten Recoverability.
Recoverability is often grouped in two key categories. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Together these two metrics define your Business Continuity and Disaster Recover (BCDR) plans. This article will help you think about key strategies that bring you closer to having a solid BCDR strategy.
LET'S DEFINE
Recovery Point Objective
RPO is defines your company’s loss tolerance: the amount of data that can be lost before significant harm to the business occurs. Your business needs to know, how much data can you afford to lose? It is a time measurement from the event that caused the loss back to the most recent preceding backup. For example in transactional processes. Accounting of financial data, manufacturing data or patient records. The number of records you process in 1 hr or 1 day, each require work to enter the data, if your backup is everyday you will lose all records from the time of the outage to the last backup. For some companies 24 hours is not acceptable and hourly backups are required.
The sheer volume of data is a possible driver, or the inability to recapture the data to re-input, or the labor required to re-input the data combined with the constant business requirements will throw operations into chaos. RPO can be measured in 1-24 hour increments or measured in seconds for near-zero loss tolerance. Your organizations backups Disaster Recovery (DR) will be aligned to what you define as an acceptable RPO.
LET'S DEFINE
Recovery Time Objective
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) refers to how much time an application can be down without causing material damage to the business. The amount of time before you can resume business as usual. Some of your business applications can tolerate being unavailable for days without impact, other higher priority, mission critical applications can only tolerate a few seconds of unavailability. The business mandates what is acceptable downtime impact for the employees, customers to avoid lost business. Your role as the system administrator is to ensure you can deliver an acceptable RTO.
WHY YOU NEED BCDR?
Be More Competitive
In part to respond to physical failure, site unavailability due to disaster but another reason is your backups with the correct architecture and security can help you to recover from ransom wear attacks. Your backups can be leverage to re-establish your primary business if it has been locked out from you due to ransomware attack.
Nth generation is well adept to help you define a functional RPO RTO to deliver you BCDR.
We have worked with small and large, local and international organizations to ensure a sustainable BCDR strategy. We work with all major vendors to delivery what is technology good fit and fiscal good fit to meet your BCDR objectives.
BENEFITS OF BCDR
#1
You do not need to setup a new DataCenter and the associated costs.
#2
Cloud backups have the flexibility to be with different vendors and or different clouds.
#3
Once successfully implemented you can have the agility to not only recover but to delivery potential Disaster Avoidance.
ASK YOURSELF
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Do you want to have a scalable appliance BCDR Strategy?
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How fast of a recovery do you need? (RTO)
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How Fast a backup do you require? How often? (RPO)
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What is you topology? Local? Across town? Across state? Global?
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How can you leverage Cloud backups?
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Do you have one, two or more data centers?