What are the factors to consider for recovery?
Staff
Will the IT Staff be available, and capable of executing the disaster recovery plan? How will they get to the alternate disaster recovery site? Are there accommodations that need to be made to ensure this? When a disaster event occurs, some key staff, may have other priorities – i.e. family etc. The Hosted Continuity Solution will mirror the client’s environment. This means that the complex and detailed configuration of your server operating systems, security patches, application installations / setup and data are all protected.With this in mind, our solution greatly reduces the amount of effort required by internal IT staff to recover those systems. Whilst their intellectual knowledge of the inner workings around the client’s systems is highly valuable, we help by taking care of that focus as soon as a disaster is declared.
Infrastructure
What communications and transportation infrastructure is required to support the plan? What if planes aren’t flying or cell phones aren’t working, or roads are closed. Your infrastructure needs are taken care of as part of our solution. Connectivity and services are geographically removed from the premises and form a critical portion of our operation.
Location
Based on the distance between the production and the disaster recovery site, what categories of disaster will or will not be addressed? Looking at Best practices, the site should be far enough away to ensure that the event is not affected by the same conditions.
We have located our facilities strategically outside of the client disaster impact zones and have ensured that the infrastructure we use to gain access and support the environment is geographically removed from the primary production site.
Disaster Declaration
How does a disaster get declared and who can declare it? When does the RTO (Recovery time objective) clock actually start ticking? Our operational guide – which is customized for each client - covers all aspects around process and procedure in the event of a full scale environment outage or individual server loss etc. We help to wrap change control management process and a clear path to action in times typically panicked by surrounding events.
Operations at the disaster recovery site
Are their sufficient staff to work across two sites, simultaneously? How long must it remain operational? What will be needed to support it? Hosted Continuity is able to assist in this area by providing various services on a short, medium and long term basis were necessary. Our professional services arm is also able to facilitate emergency staffing at relatively short notice in the event staff becoming unavailable.
Performance expectations
Will applications be expected to run at full capacity during a disaster scenario? What level of performance is acceptable? How is “usage” throttled to maintain performance for mission critical systems? In any disaster situation, various loads and requirements will be made upon equipment servicing and facilitating the “temporary” solution. Using strong virtualization capabilities, we are able to move systems quickly and efficiently between server loads and various hardware clusters.
Security
Are security requirements comparable with production? – Higher levels may be more appropriate. Data security is still a major factor during a disaster. Opportunistic individuals may use a disaster situation to gain inappropriate access to company data. Hosted Continuity requires strict adherence and prior approvals to any systems and or changes during normal operations and or a disaster situation.
Data Protection
What mechanisms and protocols will be in place at the alternate site? Hosted’s approach to ensuring customer data is protected and appropriately segregated both internally and externally is leading edge. Data Security is paramount in all IT situations today. We use firewalls, encryption, IPSEC tunnels and VLAN segmentation to facilitate high levels of security for all of our customers.
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Related Information
What is a Disaster?
What are the factors to consider for recovery?
Hosted Continuity solution overview (PDF)
Monthly Poll
How often do you backup your critical data?
Poll Results
| Daily | 36% | | Weekly | 50% | | Monthly | 9% | | Never | 6% |
Total: 442 votes
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