Data Recovery Planning

When formulating business continuity plans, the first concern is typically how fast you can get the organization running again. Whilst critical, it's only half of the recovery equation. The second part of a recovery plan needs to focus on the amount of data an organization can afford to lose.

After all, do you want your business up and running quickly, but operating with data that's a day or even a week old? While most organizations would like zero data loss and zero time loss, the cost associated with that level of protection may make the desired high availability solutions unpractical.

Common strategies for data protection are:

• Daily Backups to tape and sent off-site at regular intervals.
• Backups to disk on-site and automatically copied to off-site disk.
• Replication of data to an off-site location.
• High availability systems which keep both the data and system replicated off-site, enabling continuous access to systems and data.

In many cases, an organization may elect to use an outsourced disaster recovery provider to provide a stand-by site and systems rather than using their own remote facilities.

In addition to the recovery of data and systems, organizations must also implement preventative measures. The objective of these measures is to prevent a disaster situation in the first place.

These may include some of the following:

• Local mirrors of systems and/or data and use of disk protection technology such as RAID
• Surge Protectors
• Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)
• Backup Generator to keep systems going in the event of a power failure

Micross IT specialize in providing IT support and IT services, project management, networking, software development, VoIP, consultancy, disaster recovery and business continuity planning, Cardiff, Wales.

Micross IT is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, and a Cisco SMB Select Partner.

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