IT Disaster Recovery
The importance of having an IT Disaster Recovery strategy in place is undeniable. Whether you are a sole trader who communicates with clients via email or running a business-critical LAN/WAN with thousands of users, system failure can result in loss of crucial data, time, morale, and, in some cases, clients. Nevertheless, many people persist in failing to recognise the importance of an effective IT Disaster Recovery Strategy, or recognise that it is important but don't invest enough time or thought into it until it is too late.
In one sense, it is easier to implement a workable Disaster Recovery strategy if you run a larger business since global businesses often have multiple independent datacentres which replicate frequently. However, there are several reasons to outsource the preplanning and actual disaster recovery to experienced professionals with years of experience in the field of IT disaster recovery.
Time spent by your own in-house talent in coming up to date with current best practices, methodologies, and available technologies can result in a significant drain on your business resources before a project can even begin… even then, elements of the strategy are likely to be speculative unless your in-house staff have hands on experience with implementing similar IT disaster recovery strategies. The possible causes and natures of IT systems failure are too numerous to list, and disaster containment and recovery best practices can be highly complex in nature; if your business has even a moderate level of dependency on its IT infrastructure it is essential that the strategy is developed and, if necessary, executed by trained specialists.
If you are interested in talking to ictnorthwest about how Disaster Recovery can help your business please call 0845 094 8895 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
What is an IT disaster recovery strategy?
In Practical terms, a Disaster Recovery Strategy outlines how your business is going to operate in the event of a disaster (fire, flood, data loss etc...). We have worked with companies from many industry sectors and commercial enterprise-class networks with dozens of locations and thousands of users. Throughout our extensive experience, we have always recognised that every business is unique; as a result, we always devise a unique IT disaster recovery solution for each of our clients. Here are a few of the practical elements we review whilst developing a Disaster Recovery strategy:-
• what are the business critical processes
• in what time frame would you need to be back up and running
• how geographically dispersed are the IT systems
• in the event of a disaster, how long would your business be able to last
• current data protection/backup strategies in place
• determining most efficient control and recovery strategies
Obviously there are more elements we look at, but this gives you an idea of the array of factors involved in developing an effective IT disaster recovery strategy. Obviously, the business-critical 100% uptime is to your organisation, the more complex the solution becomes. We always try to get our clients to think about Disaster Recovery in terms of "cost of lost productivity" as well as "actual requirements". You can find that there are many ways to skin a cat with regard to disaster recovery and therefore there are often multiple options, each with its own positives and negatives. The decision often comes down to budget!
It is becoming more and more important in this fragile economy that businesses do invest in a good Disaster Recovery Strategy if they are going to survive. Anything less than a fully effective immediate response to a serious systemic problem in your IT infrastructure can have a huge negative impact on many aspects of your business.
Working in this marketplace, we know that budget is a key factor but we also keep our eyes on the prize of "100% uptime". We have many offerings which can help businesses to achieve their disaster recovery strategy, usually involving a level of sophistication which only the larger multi-nationals have previously been able to afford.