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Many IT leaders are challenged to find the cloud support their business needs. Organizational timelines for cloud adoption, cloud migration, and cloud maturity are being…
In today’s always-on, always-connected world, disaster recovery has taken on a new meaning: avoiding downtime altogether. No matter the threat, most businesses today simply cannot afford to have their data and information offline for any amount of time; so they are looking for vendors and solutions that meet these demanding, yet achievable, goals.
If this sounds familiar, here are a few ways to work with your disaster recovery provider to ensure you are prepared for every type of event while downtime is minimized or eliminated altogether.
1. Define recovery targets
Work with your provider to define application recovery targets of Zero or greater. Then, work closely with them to customize the appropriate environment to meet those requirements. This may range from dedicated servers in a high-availability environment, with automatic failover to a number of other replication methods including software, SAN, and data switch with defined recovery targets and objectives (e.g. hot stand-by, warm stand-by).
2. Identify data migration & data replication requirements
Look at and understand your data migration needs and options. Work with your provider to determine the best near real-time replication solution, such as a database replication system that takes logs from a relational database and replicates them from your production system(s).
3. Ensure network integration
Make sure you have a network infrastructure that can integrate your IT environment into your provider’s reliable and secure data center quickly and cost-effectively.
4. Understand (and demand) support services
Ask questions. Ensure your provider can deliver 24/7 system monitoring, daily backup, recovery services and operational monitoring of your servers. Do they provide: monitoring of communication links, enterprise backup facility, secure data center facilities and managed firewall services?
At Connectria we offer highly customized business continuity plans depending on recovery objectives, the platform used (such as our IBM i DR plans) and budget. We realize that a DR plan may not be the top priority for an IT organization, but is well worth the extra expense. Would you organization be able to deal with the alternative- shutting down the business for a day, a week, or even several months? How would customers feel about that scenario?