Continuing on the disaster recovery theme from my i365 colleague Carine Blanchet’s recent post, “Key Considerations for Disaster Recovery Preparedness”, last week The New York Times published an educational article entitled, “A Small-Business Guide to Disaster Recovery”, which advises that every business, especially SMBs, should have a DR plan in place.

The article notes “the most common business disaster is data loss, which can result from a number of causes including human error, hardware failure, natural disaster and theft,” and states it “is easy to recover from if you have a backup solution in place.”

The article then provides advice on how SMBs can ensure they have the right backup solution in place, and makes some great points such as:

• it is important to have backups “offsite, secure and available for recovery 24/7”
• “backup is nothing without recovery”
• online backup is a popular approach to meet the above objectives “with the added benefit of (providing users with) ease of use and automation”

While the article also covers the importance of the communications and people aspect of DR planning, it is missing one crucial element − disaster recovery is not just about the data.

If data is an organization’s lifeblood then the critical servers and applications are its vital organs. These systems, such as email, transaction processing, customer database, etc, help sustain and run the business, and if they are lost in the event of a disaster then business grinds to a halt – even if all data is recoverable.

Carine also wrote in a recent BusinessComputingWorld article “Five Cost-Effective Ways To Ensure Fast, Complete Data Recovery”:

What happens if you suffer a regional or site-wide disaster? How quickly can you recover your critical systems? Unless you have made prior arrangements for a recovery site, you’re likely to suffer an extended loss of operations that could threaten your organization’s survival. Large companies typically create redundant data centers or hot sites that enable almost instantaneous recovery after a disaster. However, such solutions are costly and thus impractical for many small- to mid-sized businesses.

Fortunately for SMBs (as well as enterprises), the cloud and virtualization technology is leveling the playing field, making DR services that protect both systems and data a viable and affordable option for organizations of all sizes.

In her July 24, 2009 blog post about her report, “How The Cloud Will Transform Disaster Recovery Services,” Forrester Research analyst Stephanie Balaouras writes that cloud-based backup and virtual disaster recovery services are available now and helping businesses “address major pain points in IT.” She concludes that “every IT operations professional must now seriously consider these services when evaluating any backup or DR offering.”

So what does this all mean? It means SMBs need to not only backup and protect their data offsite but also their critical business systems as well. And if internal resources and/or expertise are limited then using a cloud-based/online service is a cost-effective approach as no capital infrastructure expenditures are required.

The New York Times article concludes that “the best preparation for any situation you may face is to have a well-thought-out plan in place.” And using an integrated system and data recovery solution should be an essential component of that plan….

Posted by John Sun

Tags: disaster recovery, disaster recovery testing, DR test, recovery process, recovery time objective, Remote Disaster Recovery, RTO

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 1:36 pm and is filed under Recovery Best Practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.