Have you considered the implications of human and natural disasters for your organization?
You’ll realise that you can’t afford to lose high value data or be down for longer than your business can handle. Knowing this, a secondary data center to ensure you don’t lose even seconds may be a necessity. For a streamlined data continuity service, our data center is situated perfectly to offer strategic support to time critical organizations within Houston. Traditional cold site strategies certainly have their benefit, but for most organizations there is a harsh reality with time limitations.
How to create a disaster recovery strategy?
The very first part of creating an effective disaster recovery plan is to define what the needs and expectations of your organisation are. By this, we have to understand the core business risk posed by an outage.- Are lives at risk by your system being offline?
- What level of outage can your infrastructure withstand?
- How much revenue is lost?
Outages are inevitable, what would you like the credibility of your IT department to be post outage?
In many ways, disaster recovery can fall within business continuity. Business continuity is about retaining full functioning of the business throughout disasters, there is a large scope to this strategy. Utilizing a synchronous dark fiber connection, our data center can provide an instantaneous switchover from a primary site in Houston, meaning that business operations remain functional.
When an organization gets hit by downtime after a disaster, disaster recovery is how they get back to operations and normal IT infrastructure. Alongside the data, this means they also need to get access back to software, hardware, networking equipment, connectivity and power. Unfortunately, often the causes of losing access to these resources in the first place will also render the facilities where those resources are sourced unusable, meaning a secondary datacenter is needed to ensure data safety. There are two main forms of disaster recovery services: one based in the Cloud, where all your data is backed up within cloud servers; the other form is having your data backed up at a secondary site in a far off location. Both of these approaches are classed as Cold Site and can take days to initiate a complete recovery.
This strategy provides continuity of data, but not operations. Expect to be down until your primary site is recovered, but rest assured that you will have your latest snapshot of backup data. If there has been damage to a primary data source and a loss of data, worst case scenario is that a full restore from the axillary site has to be initiated. Often with secondary sites, the thought process is that distance = safety. However, what must be factored in is the time it takes to return the lost data to where it needs to be. It takes a long time to move data, both from the cloud or another city. Even in this day and age, the fastest way to transport all the information for large organizations is by the truckload. Companies actually deliver their data on the back of a truck because it’s the fastest solution, that isn’t limited by bandwidth to download with.