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?
Ensuring these questions are answered is how to create a strategy that meets your organisation’s needs. However, the needs of an organisation, from a purely functional standpoint, are often separate to what is expected. These expectations are defined by company leadership and the people who use the service. When deciding on your company’s business continuity plan, if the expectations are higher than the needs and there is an outage, you have a personal credibility risk but not a core business risk. This can often lead to an unwanted desire to change how the IT department works, forcing additional spend and a constant state of change. If the expectations are lower than the needs, you potentially have leadership that won’t want to pay for their actual needs to be met. Again, there is a personal credibility risk here, in addition to a real business risk. If there is an outage and you have failed to create a disaster recovery plan that covers your core business needs, there could be serious damage caused.

Outages are inevitable, what would you like the credibility of your IT department to be post outage?

customer trust graph after disaster recovery

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.

Hot Site Business Continuity For Houston

Our strategic positioning to Houston means that if a plug gets pulled at your primary site, there might be a momentary blip, but we’ll instantly be up and running. Chances are, users won’t even notice the downtime. With a dark fiber connection to the primary data center linking us, we can be synced for instantaneous and functional data continuity. Our disaster recovery in Houston, means that we are a safe enough distance from major threats that could render your primary site useless. While the distance is close enough to offer unrivaled speed in getting online. The question is, when you report to your CEO about the downtime, would you prefer to state that you were down for a millisecond, 45 minutes, or longer? In time critical organisations, every moment counts. Learn more about our datacenter here.
Hot Site Business Continuity location on map
secure offices part of disaster recovery protocal

Disaster recovery and relocation of key personnel to secure offices

We have dedicated offices, common spaces and conference amenities, as well as more dynamic hoteling offices that can be used throughout a DR protocol to relocate key operational staff. This means the employees that need to be right in the heart of the situation to work with the data can directly manage and tap into the resources immediately at their fingertips.

Tailoring For Your Organization’s Disaster Recovery Needs

Our success in maintaining a functional operation for organizations is through providing a service that specifically caters for your needs. Disaster recovery and data continuity is not a one size fits all model, every company has specific needs that have to be thought of when creating a disaster recovery plan. Understanding a company’s critical operational needs and prioritizing from there is the very beginning of creating an effective data recovery plan. Whether it’s an entire system, database, a single application or personel, we work to keep your needs at the heart of the disaster recovery process.
TRG Datacenter servers