Disaster Recovery

The Business Case

Business continuity is critical. 85% of businesses which have a catastrophic failure cease trading within two years. In fact, most of us knew some of these companies. The scary thing is that this has been the case for the past 10 years. Even if you do have a disaster recovery plan, when was the last time it was tested? Could you challenge your IT department to run a disaster recovery test at all? What about monthly? What about tomorrow?

Now imagine that test was for real. Every email missed, every transaction re-keyed. It is time to look for the new solution which does work. Prices have dropped, and technology evolved. Something tried and tested and used by companies who rely on their technology.

The Technology Solution

If most IT teams were asked ‘Do you have a Business Continuity Strategy and Disaster Recovery Plan?’ The answer would often lie somewhere in between.

There’s a certain amount of yes and there’s certain amount of hesitation. The hesitation is because even though they have the strategy in place, ultimately they know underneath that if the surface was scratched, and it had to be actioned, they would have varying, if disappointing results because the current technologies for backup, disaster recovery and business continuity just don’t cut it. They don’t work very well, they’re incredibly difficult to manage and they cost an absolute fortune to maintain.

What virtualisation technologies allow you to do is simplify disaster recovery, and actually deliver on the promise of being able to bring up your infrastructure in another location in the event of a problem, and make all of your applications highly available instead of just one or two making your whole system flexible and transportable in a way that it just isn’t possible with traditional infrastructure.

By Virtualising, you are basically doing more with less; you’re becoming more energy efficient, but you’re also creating a flexible system that delivers on what the Disaster Recovery Plan says.