Backup and Disaster Recovery

Business continuity planning

A business can be permanently crippled by loss of crucial data. Significant IT downtime can permanently lose you customers and damage your reputation. It is therefore essential to have a comprehensive continuity and backup plan in place. This will enable your business to recover and resume in the event of unforeseen IT problems.

We can analyse your business to determine the most probable threats to business continuity, their likelihood, and the potential impact each would cause. This forms the basis of a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, which would outline the key mitigation steps covering each scenario.

Backup planning

A robust backup strategy is absolutely essential. If all of your businesses’ critical data is fully backed up then, regardless of what disaster may strike, it should eventually be possible to fully recover your systems to their earlier working state. Without robust backups, permanent data loss is a real possibility.

Backup considerations include:

• How often backups should be performed
• How much data needs to be backed up
• How long backup data should be retained

We recommend both offsite and onsite backups.

Offsite backups

These are backups, usually performed over a secure internet connection, from the master data source to a physically separate location. This means that, even if the master data source is completely destroyed, such as by fire or flood, a full copy of the data still exists elsewhere and can be recovered.

We can advise you on all aspects of offsite backups, such as choosing between the many commercial cloud storage providers, or setting up your own dedicated remote backup server. We will configure your systems so that all offsite backup processes run automatically and cannot be compromised by human error.

Onsite backups

We also recommend onsite backups from the master data source to another storage device located on the same local network, because:

• It is a good idea to have at least two complete backups of all business-critical data – if you only had an offsite backup and its data was permanently lost, without a secondary backup you would suddenly be highly exposed to a threat to your master data source
• Local networks are much faster than internet connections. If the master data source is lost, it is much quicker to restore data from an onsite than offsite backup

Failover management

If your business would be damaged by even a small amount of downtime, you may want to consider a full failover management system. This is where all critical business data and systems are replicated in real-time to a secondary system in the event of failure. It works by automatically and immediately migrating usage to the secondary system if the primary system experiences downtime. The migration happens with no data integrity issues or other discontinuities.

If a full failover management system is not needed, but there are still particular areas of your business which cannot tolerate any downtime, such as email or particular applications, there are more targeted failover solutions available.

We can advise what level of failover, or alternatives such as contract support agreements, are most appropriate for your business.