Historically, business continuity solutions have required companies to own multiple datacenters, employ highly technical support and maintenance staff, and spend up to 50% of your total IT budget to guarantee an always on infrastructure.
The cloud makes BCDR services accessible to more companies than ever, primarily due to the high availability inherent to cloud environments and the cost effectiveness of extending existing, on-premise infrastructures across multiple datacenters for failover and redundancy. Flexibility and scalability have for a long time been a limitation of physical infrastructure builds, while cloud environments allow for rapid scale, flexibility and control.
Application Recovery Considerations
When you are analyzing the availability and recovery of your mission-critical applications, consider the following list of highly-likely clinical disasters. Clinical disasters are three times more likely to occur than a catastrophic disaster and customers are significantly less understanding of outages due to a preventable, clinical disaster.
Disasters come in all shapes and sizes
These can be natural or man-made, catastrophic or clinical. No matter the scenario, you must plan for such contingencies to avoid disastrous downtime. The best offense is a good defense.
Machines and hardware fail
It’s true. Software breaks and components fail. Eliminating single points of failure in the IT infrastructure is the only way to ensure that a failure doesn’t interrupt service or cause data loss.
Humans are not perfect
They make mistakes and sometimes do it on purpose. Even the most cautious can forget a step in an important process causing disastrous results.
Customer retention is costly, and re-acquisition is devastatingly expensive.
It takes a lot to earn customers’ trust, and after an IT disaster like loss of data or an extended outage in service, trust quickly evaporates.
12 Factors to Evaluate Your Preparedness
- Have you determined your total cost of downtime for mission-critical applications?
- Do you have a current Business Impact Analysis (BIA)/Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)?
- Are critical processes included in the document?
- Do you have an off-site location for recovery?
- Has your company determined and agreed to the level of service provided while in recovery-mode?
- Have responsibilities for immediately following, and continuing through reestablishing normal operations been assigned to staff and management?
- Have you identified the hardware and software required to recover mission-critical applications and/or functions?
- Is a current copy of your DRP maintained off-site?
- Do all users of the DRP have access to a current copy at the time of a disaster?
- Is a communication plan (with multiple communication channels) included in your DRP?
- Does the DRP include a Training, Testing and Exercise (TT&E) plan?
- Has your team determined that DRP and TT&E have met all requirements to provide reasonable assurance?
Considering these twelve factors, does your organization have an adequate disaster recovery plan in place?
Hosting.com takes a consultative approach in assisting you with disaster preparedness. We also recognize that you require an affordable and reliable BCDR solution to meet your budgetary and business requirements. Contact us today (888-894-4678) to schedule a disaster recovery evaluation with one of our specialist.
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