A disaster recovery strategy details the steps needed to enable a business to be back up and running following a critical incident.
With organisations becoming ever more dependent on IT for running their business, IT recovery has become an increasingly important element of a business’s strategy, enabling the business to reduce risk and continue to operate as quickly as possible if a disaster occurs.
At Simplex, we work in partnership with your team to assess, plan and implement an apposite disaster recovery solution and provide comprehensive documentation and regular quarterly or annual tests to ensure you can continue to operate as a business in the event of a critical incident.
Why have a disaster recovery plan?
Today, customers’ expectations have never been higher, and even a small interruption to or reduction in service can result in customers looking elsewhere.
Disaster can strike in various guises, resulting from human error, hardware issues, cyberattack, or natural disaster with the impact potentially devasting, and involving loss of revenue, and damage to customer relationships and reputation.
Therefore, to reduce the risks associated with disaster, every business regardless of size, needs a robust disaster recovery strategy to cover incidents, whatever the severity. As well as protecting against major catastrophe, such as complete loss of the business premises, protection should also be defined for more isolated issues – for example, the loss of a key business system.
Specific reasons for creating a new or revising an existing disaster recovery strategy include:
- To meet newly introduced legislation or industry regulation requirements.
- To meet the need to replace an aging existing on-premises backup solution.
- In response to a corporate requirement to improve the time taken to recover from a disaster.
- As a result of a company decision to reduce the amount of data that it is acceptable to lose during a period of disruption.
READ: BUILDING OPERATIONAL RESILIENCE SHOULD BE ON THE AGENDA OF EVERY BUSINESS
Using Cloud for Disaster Recovery
We’re seeing increasing numbers of customers turning to the cloud to address disaster recovery requirements. There are several reasons to consider the cloud for disaster recovery planning:
- No large, upfront hardware costs – services, data, and infrastructure copies are stored in the cloud and recovery services are only turned on if needed.
- Unlimited storage capacity – one of the many advantages of cloud services is the ability to flex up and down with storage requirements, depending on need.
- Increased agility – the environment can grow or shrink to meet your business’s requirements.
- Improved security – encryption is incorporated by default.
- Enhanced availability and reliability – supported by multiple datacentres across geographical regions, with zone and stack options available.
The Simplex Framework
Our disaster recovery service is geared to support any business looking to address disaster recovery challenges. Whether for a single on-premise server, a small comms room or a full-blown datacentre, replicating services to the public cloud delivers increased agility, enhanced security and lower costs.
At Simplex, our Disaster Recovery service comprises of the following phases:
Assess
- Review your existing IT infrastructure and applications to assess backup readiness.
- Propose a detailed DR plan, designed to enable you to achieve your business goals.
Implement
- Provide you with a detailed document detailing your disaster recovery strategy.
- Set up and deploy disaster recovery software.
- Replicate your existing IT infrastructure to the cloud.
- Ensure the environment is secure.
- Complete a test failover.
Optimise
- Perform analysis and monitoring to optimise your cloud spend and usage.
- Use security and management tools to govern, secure, and monitor your cloud investment.
Manage
- A quarterly or annual disaster recovery test and review of the plan.
- Monitoring cloud infrastructure.
- Reactive support.
- Proactive security management.
If you’d like more information about our DR service, do check out the brochure for our Operational Resilience.
Photo courtesy: Markus Spiske
