STORAGE
Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery
Do you run applications on bare metal?
Is your IT infrastructure entirely virtual?
Do you use tape backups?
Is backup to disk part of your strategy?
OVERVIEW
How it Works
Today’s modern IT operations are complex, and your organization may be highly dependent on those processes to ensure business operates smoothly. IT operations typically include accounts payable/receivable, client billing, order processing, quote generation, and other numerous processes to provide essential services needed by the organization to operate. These services may involve many inter-dependent systems, for example: databases, a web front end, or an application that crunches numbers. In addition to application interdependencies, there are infrastructure resources that power these applications, such as shared storage, compute, and networking. Today’s system administrator is charged to ensure uptime availability, performance, security, manageability, and the often-forgotten “recoverability” that can meet the organization’s business continuity requirements.
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.
Cost / Risk
Cost of System
Availability
Risk of
System Downtime
Cost of Data
Availability
Risk of
Data Loss
Hours
RPO
Hours of lost data
Seconds
Hours
RTO
Hours to restore data
IDEAL SOLUTION
LET'S DEFINE
Recovery Point Objective
RPO defines your company’s loss tolerance: the amount of data that can be lost before significant harm to the business occurs. An organization needs to define how much data it can afford to lose. This consists of a time measurement from the event that caused the loss, back to the most recent preceding functional backup. For some organizations, 24 hours of data loss (RPO) is not acceptable. This triggers the need for backups/data replication technologies capable of duplicating your data hourly or more frequent time intervals.
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. An organization should mandate what is acceptable downtime impact for employees and 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
The traditional needs of a solid BCDR solution include the ability to recover from physical failure or any type of disaster. Another critical element is your backups. With the correct architecture and security, they help empower you to recover from the ever-increasing and alarming ransomware attacks. Your backups can be leveraged to re-establish your primary business if it has been locked out due to ransomware.
Nth Generation is well adept to help you define a functional RPO, RTO, and perform a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to help architect and deliver a BCDR designed to meet your organization’s business continuity requirements.
BENEFITS OF BCDR
#1
You do not need to setup a new datacenter, including the associated costs.
#2
Cloud backups have the flexibility to work with numerous technology vendors and clouds.
#3
Once successfully implemented, you have the agility to not only recover but to achieve potential “disaster avoidance”.