As we prepare to roll our a new service offering “Onsite DR” i would like to take a moment to share some of the reasons why you need to start thinking disaster recovery.
ONSITE DR is a rented service from weloveIT. A replica of your live servers is made onto one of our disaster recovery servers. This server is monitored and maintained by a team of Senior IT engineers to ensure healthy copies are made of your entire organization on a per min basis. We have several styles of DR but the most common is onsite replica + offsite rotation. A slightly less powerful copy of your servers is made every 15min and a daily increment is stored on our heart servers, then on a weekly visist our technicians will pull a full copy of those increments and take the data offsite to our DR center. In the event of hardware failure, we are able to power on your entire organization in a matter of minutes restoring production environment. In the event of fire, theft or surge, we are able to power on the last know replica in a virtual environment at our OFFSITE DR center and enable access to critical information and services.
From as little as R2000.00 a month, weloveIT can custom design and implement a Disaster Recovery Policy and Procedure to suite any business.
Top 5 Reasons Why Your IT Disaster Recovery Plan Should Be A Top Priority
We have all heard the horror stories of simple mistakes that lead to costly business disasters. It seems like every day on the news we hear about the next recall or outage that leads to the need for public relations to clean up the mess. More often than not, the damage is too great to overcome and the company that suffered the IT disaster can’t recover. Having an IT disaster recovery plan is a critical business need.
Planning for the unknown can be difficult, but having enough funds to implement an IT disaster recovery plan can seem close to impossible. But how unlikely is it that an IT disaster will happen to your company? With the combination of natural disasters, hardware failures and human error, the reality is that data loss is only a matter of when, not if.
Here are the top 5 reasons why your company should rethink its IT disaster recovery and prevention plans.
1. You’re only as strong as your weakest link. The age-old saying is as true today as it was when first uttered. You can have one of the most well crafted ships ever made, but if your crew can’t see the iceberg just beyond your line of sight, then it doesn’t matter upon impact. No business is immune to IT disasters, but there are many things you can do to prevent them or quickly recover. There is no excuse not to have an IT disaster recovery plan in place – today. An ideal disaster recovery plan would place your production servers in a top tier data center with no single point of failure on the power and network connections. Your disaster recovery backup servers would be at another data center at least 45 miles away in case of a severe natural disaster. This would ensure that you’re virtually protected from any downtime, and you have put your business in position to survive the most brutal IT disasters.
2. Customer retention is costly, but customer re-acquisition is devastatingly expensive. While on average it is much cheaper to retain a customer then to acquire a new customer, re-acquiring an old customer after an IT disaster can be next to impossible. It takes a lot to earn customers’ trust, but after an IT disaster like loss of data or an extended outage in service, trust quickly evaporates. This is especially true when your customers are losing up to thousands of dollars per minute of downtime, which is not uncommon in some industries. Most IT disasters are deemed absolutely unacceptable to end users. Get a disaster recovery plan–it is far less expensive to prevent a disaster than try to re-acquire lost customers after one has occurred.
3. Customers expect perfection. The Internet and the Web 2.0 revolution have not only forced companies to be more transparent and accountable but competition in all in industries has greatly increased. With increased competition come lower prices, better service, and less forgiving customers. Most customers demand perfection because they know that if your company can’t provide it, the next competitor in line is ready to give it their best shot to win the business. It’s imperative not to give your customers a reason to leave because of something preventable like an outage in service.
4. Much like machines, humans are not perfect. They make mistakes. Have you ever accidentally saved over a word document or had your computer crash before you could save an important file? It happens to the best of us. Even the most cautious can forget a step in an important process causing data loss or the wrong data to being entered. While very common, these mistakes can often be the hardest to prevent and correct. Having a disaster recovery plan that creates a series of incremental online data backups lets you easily restore your files to an error-free state. Having redundant firewalls, anti-virus, and anti-spyware software can ensure that security breaches are protected against if one were accidentally disabled or a port left open. Often times the most important way to prevent human error is in process improvements and quality assurance activities. A disaster recovery plan that incorporates checking and double checking is often the best remedy, along withonline backups is best.
5. Machines and hardware fail. While modern IT hardware is fairly resistant to failures, most devices fall far short of a perfect track record. No one is immune to hard disk or internet connection failures. While it can be costly for your company to eliminate any single point of failure in your IT infrastructure, having a disaster recovery plan that does this is the only way to insure that a hardware failure doesn’t interrupt your service or cause data loss. The less expensive and more sensible option would be to have your data backed up regularly. Ideally, and more cost-effective than building your own top-of-the-line data center, would be to outsource your IT infrastructure to a leading Disaster Recovery as a Service managed data center operator. This eliminates any capital expenses while ensuring the strictest protection from service interruptions due to IT infrastructure failures.
Conclusion: Save money, save your customers, save your business. Develop a solid IT disaster recovery plan. No business is invulnerable to IT disasters, but speedy recovery due to a well-crafted IT disaster recovery plan is expected by today’s ever-demanding customers. Too many businesses fail because they were ill prepared for an IT disaster, even when a simple solution like online backup could have easily saved them. If you haven’t thought about developing an IT disaster recovery plan yet, it should be at the top of your priority list. Your business and customers demand it.