Article by Tanzeel
Every business, be it small-scale or large-scale, suffer when a natural disaster occurs. You can’t avoid the uncertainties of natural hazards because it’s beyond our control. However, you can work on a disaster recovery plan that will help you restore your system in less time.
There are IT Disaster Recovery companies that provide Disaster Recovery as a service (aka DRaaS Service). It aims to restore business operations when an organization is affected by unforeseen events such as earthquakes, floods, and other environmental problems. The business owners work hand in hand with the DRaaS providers to create a data recovery strategy that highlights how to restore the essential IT infrastructure and back up data/application.
IT Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity – What’s the difference?
People often use both of the terms interchangeably, but there is a fine line between the two. IT Disaster recovery refers to a plan to bring an organization’s IT System back on its feet following a natural disaster.
On the other hand, Business Continuity focuses on resuming business operations in critical situations. Such situations demand an effective strategy to save the reputation of an organization. In the case of any disaster event that disrupts the business operations, there should be alternate process capabilities, such as shifting its services from one region to another during and after the disaster, which would mean less downtime.
What are RPO and RTO?
RPO and RTO are two critical metrics that companies should take into account when they are developing an active IT disaster recovery plan to keep their business running, after a disaster strikes.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) determines how often you should backup your data. It’s the maximum amount of files a business could recover from backup to resume the operations after an unexpected event. Every company processes millions of data every day. Therefore it’s essential to back up data regularly. If a company has an RPO of 24 hours, it should backup data every 24 hours to be on the safe side. Otherwise, your company will lose a significant amount of data.
On the other hand, the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) determines how quickly a company can restore its IT infrastructure right after any disruptive event, to sustain business continuity. In simple words, RTO refers to the maximum downtime any organization can handle. If a business has an RTO of 5 hours, it means that the company can keep the operations running for that time duration, without having its IT infrastructure available.
Both the above critical metrics would help the IT disaster recovery company to design and put forward an optimal IT disaster recovery plan. Think of how you can meet your RPO goals. For example, an organization can devise an automated RPO strategy whereby data is stored in backup storage automatically at specified timings.
A shorter RTO and RPO implies that the IT disaster recovery solution will be expensive. Therefore, companies have to measure the cost-benefits against the risk.
IT Disaster Recovery Testing
As soon as the IT disaster recovery plan establishes, the testing phase starts in which the DR planners evaluate the performance of the system for a specified time frame. For example, if a company’s recovery site is in another region, the operations are shifted there for a particular time to test the system. However, testing may not always be possible due to time constraints and unavailability of resources. Therefore, the DR planners provide documentation and demonstration to the system users.
IT Disaster Recovery As A Service (IT DRaaS)
Many IT disaster recovery companies offer DRaaS, and one such company is Accrets.
With its private cloud services, Accrets provides an entirely secure IT infrastructure to run your business seamlessly without worrying about any failure caused by uncertain circumstances. Buying a separate Data Center that includes hardware equipment is indeed very expensive. Thanks to Accrets, you can subscribe to data center infrastructure resources at an affordable cost to store your business data. Not only that, Accrets offers robust Disaster Recovery services to make sure that your business operations remain uninterrupted at times of disasters.
Be it a natural disaster or technical issue, Accrets’ team work with you to maintain your business operation during difficult times.
