Sunday, March 30, 2014

Why integrating backup into your Disaster Recovery and Business Plans is critical

By: Paul Oh   Categories:Storage and Data Management, Data Protection





Data backup and developing a plan to restore aren’t the first steps in business continuity planning. However it's still a critical element. Without a solid backup and disaster recovery plan, your organization could face important risks and stand to lose financially due to downtime or data loss.

Up until recently, an effective disaster recovery strategy usually meant that your secondary IT setup needed to be a carbon copy of your primary data centre. The reason for this was that applications—OS, updates, patches and all—were tied to one physical server.
 
Server virtualization changed everything. Now, the hypervisor sits between applications and the physical device, and where you could only restore apps and data to identical servers, now you can also restore on any device. In fact, you can now use mirroring in real time or near real time to enable failover to the secondary server estate in minutes or seconds.  Having backup or snapshots is important to safeguard against corrupt data replicating from the primary to the disaster recovery site.

Using data deduplication followed by compression is also an effective way to reduce the amount of data that’s backed while still ensuring that critical data is readily available in the event of an emergency. It’s becoming an increasingly popular approach to handling massive (and growing) data volumes, especially when it comes to disaster recovery strategies.

You can still find servers that are not virtualized in organizations that are most advanced in IT terms. But the fact that most are in the majority of IT departments, disaster recovery has become a much easier task when you only needed to keep a few servers entirely physical.

The cloud is an even bigger game changer when it comes to disaster recovery. Remote resources are enabling data replication; then, should an outage occur, your organization can continue operations with employees working from any location through the cloud while your physical IT facilities are restored.

Before you develop a detailed recovery plan, you need to analyse risk, perform a risk assessment (RA) and/or business impact analysis to identify the IT services that support the organization’s critical business activities. You will also need to test and train and continuously update all of the above. Then, you’ll need to establish recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).

Sentia is an expert advisor in this field so feel free to contact me at 1-866-610-8489 or send me a note to discuss and request guidance.

Paul Oh, Vice President, Technical Services
Sentia
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Sarah Warsi
Sarah Warsi

Paul Oh

As marketing manager, Sarah plays a key role in managing Sentia's marketing efforts including developing the overall marketing strategy and direction, digital and social media management, to campaign development and execution.

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As marketing manager, Sarah plays a key role in managing Sentia's marketing efforts including developing the overall marketing strategy and direction, digital and social media management, to campaign development and execution. She holds a degree in Journalism from Ryerson University.

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