Every business needs a strong disaster recovery plan. Like any difficult topic, disaster recovery is something that nobody wants to think about, but everyone needs to plan for. Disaster recovery is the ability to continue work after any number of catastrophic problems, ranging from a computer virus or hacker attack to a natural disaster such as flood, fire, or earthquake. Having a disaster recovery plan in place takes a little time and effort, but the peace of mind it brings and the ability to continue work after the unthinkable are well worth it.
Disaster recovery must take into account how a business is run and the different elements required to keep the business going. These needs vary from business to business, and a good disaster recovery plan should be designed for the individual business’ needs. Using a generic disaster recovery strategy is better than nothing, but it may stress elements that are less important to your business, or worse, leave out critical aspects.
The first step to crafting an individual disaster recovery plan is mapping out the most critical aspects of day to day business. If a great deal of time is spent communicating with clients over the phone, then a backup phone system needs to be addressed. This can be as simple as having employee mobile phones, so that if the office’s land line is damaged, workers can call clients using their mobile phones. It may also be as complex as having a backup call centre located in another state, so that traffic can be routed to another location if problems arise at a certain call centre.
Data safety is perhaps one of the most crucial and overlooked aspects of disaster recovery. Being able to call your clients on another phone system is little help if you do not have a list of clients, their orders, and their phone numbers. You cannot take new orders if you do not have access to your inventory system or are unable to put in new shipping orders. Data disaster recovery often includes making frequent backups of all critical data and records, both digital and hard copies, and storing them in a secure, remote location.
It is also important to keep in mind the time frame for disaster recovery. If your company needs to be able to recover almost instantly from a disaster, much more complex and redundant steps must be taken than if you have the ability to spend more time recovering. If your company works in a real time, online environment, you need multiple backup systems standing by so that, in the event of a disaster, they can instantly come online. If your company works in longer time frames, then allowing for several hours or days to recover records, organise documents, and resume work may be acceptable.
In the event of a disaster, will your business have the ability to pick up the pieces and get back to work, or will things grind to a halt? While it isn’t possible to plan for every event, a solid disaster recovery plan can make all the difference. A disaster recovery plan is one of those difficult but necessary aspects of a successful business. With luck, you may never need to rely on your disaster recovery plan, but if you ever do, you’ll be glad that you planned ahead.
Storage Craft Shadow Protect Backup Solutions
ShadowProtect Server Edition 4 provides the following benefits:
- Bare metal recovery of Windows servers in minutes.
- Restore or migrate backup images to and from physical systems and virtual environments (P2V, V2P and V2V).
- Hardware independent restore of backup images to different systems (P2P).
- Full support for online backup of applications such as Exchange and SQL.
- Schedule automatic full and incremental backups.
- Image management to minimise storage consumption and simplify archiving.
- Bootable recovery CD provides automatic hardware detection and network support.
- A simple view to quickly recover files and folders or update backup images.
- Compress and encrypt backup images for efficiency and security.
- ShadowProtect console to simplify backup management across your enterprise.
- Recover your servers remotely.
- Save backup images to USB, Firewire, NAS, SAN or any network location.
- Fast and reliable backup and recovery.
- ShadowProtect allows you to create an exact online backup of your system and data at any point in time. Recover critical data by simply viewing your backup and restoring the files and folders that you need. Use the ShadowProtect Recovery CD for remote or bare metal recovery.
Schedule automatic backups
ShadowProtect provides an easy to use scheduler so that point-in-time backups can be taken automatically while you work. Schedule full or incremental backups of your system and data.
Save backups to any location.
ShadowProtect backups can be saved to USB, FireWire, an attached storage device or network location.
View backup files for quick file and folder recovery
ShadowProtect point-in-time backups can be assigned a drive letter as a read-write or read-only volume. The mounting features of ShadowProtect allow you to restore files and folders or update an existing point-in-time backup.
High Availability Cloud Based Online Backup
The Digital O2 Solution is ideal for full server imaged based backups. the latest product in the range, is designed to maximise the availability of server operating systems. Saving a complete image of your installation – both software and data – ensures your servers can be replicated quickly. Created by StorageCraft ShadowProtect Continuous Incremental Technology, Digital O2 Cloud Backup allows you to perform frequent image backups over the internet.
Perfectly positioned for disaster recovery, you can choose to restore your information in the same environment, a completely different environment or in a virtual environment. Digital O2 Cloud Backup can be customised to support any customer or market. Ideal for installations with more than 100GB of data.