Recent floods across Australia are a devastating reminder of the threat that natural disasters pose to businesses and the importance of having an adequate Business Continuity and IT Disaster Recovery strategy in place. The disaster has affected thousands of businesses, with many invoking their Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan to manage the relocation of staff and restore access to data and business applications.

The enormity of the recent disaster highlights the need for a Business Continuity Strategy to address both the human and IT elements of disaster recovery. The plan needs to ensure that the right resources and procedures are in place to manage and coordinate the movement or relocation of staff during a disaster. It must also provide for the rapid recovery of IT systems so access to critical data and continuity of business operations is assured as part of the disaster response. For many organisations that experienced significant outages during the recent crisis, it was not the lack of a recovery plan or standby infrastructure that delayed their business recovery, rather it was the lack of availability of staff resources, relevant processes, and a mature yet flexible disaster recovery methodology that led to greater than expected outages.

In the wake of this tragedy, many businesses will now be re-evaluating their Disaster Recovery strategies and carefully reviewing whether they are sufficient to enable their business to survive such a disaster. Some key questions businesses should be asking with regard to their IT Disaster Recovery are:

• How long would it take my business to get back online currently?
• Would the necessary resources definitely be available to manage the businesses recovery?
• Are my processes for recovery relevant and flexible enough to cater for various disaster scenarios?
• Has my Disaster Recovery plan been successfully tested to ensure the recovery process is timely and efficient?
• What guarantee is there that Service Levels can be met to minimise downtime?

Dedicated resources and processes to bring business back online quickly

It is important to think of Disaster Recovery as more than a just technology solution. Businesses must focus on the availability of resources and people needed to manage the recovery process and provide the relevant experience and expertise to do so in a timely manner.

Organisations that implement a disaster recovery solution that fails to accurately take into account resources, expertise, and process can find out the hard way that their internal IT teams are unable to successfully recover their environment. In a disaster situation, internal staff resources may be unavailable to work, unable to access your site or your systems, and almost certainly will be focussed on managing other aspects of the disaster including staff relocation, communication issues, and the rebuilding of your production environment.

Disaster Recovery Service Provider Global Storage delivers a complete recovery strategy for your business that takes into account both the technology and the human resource response required to keep your business operating.

In the event of a disaster, Global Storage provides a highly experienced recovery team dedicated to bringing your business back online quickly and efficiently. With the extensive experience and practice in dealing with these situations, this team is able to ensure your business recovery objectives are met and business applications are brought back on-line according to your required service levels.

Managing Business Risk with a Fully Managed Disaster Recovery Service

In the event of a disaster, organisations want assurance that the organisation can access the data necessary to provide business continuance including client services. A key part of mitigating risk for organisations is ensuring client relationships are intact and protected during unexpected outages and business disruptions. The risk of not having an adequate disaster recovery strategy in place is too great to leave to chance.

Businesses are attracted to the Global Storage SLAs that guarantee its data is being backed up and replicated off-site automatically, and provide an agreed response time following a declared disaster. Distributed, multi-site environments are centrally managed by Global Storage, enabling organisations to focus on the value that IT can provide at the business level whilst Global Storage manages the details and mechanics of your storage, archive, and recovery platforms.

Protecting and Recovering Business Applications

Global Storage managed services address a number of unique key challenges presented in IT environments, particularly around the large amounts of changing data. Global Storage has designed specific disaster recovery methodologies and processes for recovering different business applications and systems.

Key challenges for some systems which Global Storage has addressed include the lengthy backup and replication windows required to protect applications and the speed with which lost data and business critical applications can be recovered in the event of an outage. Global Storage managed disaster recovery services allow for the rapid recovery of data or entire systems at either the customer site or the Global Storage recovery centre. Global Storage use a combination of data de-duplication and Continuous Data Replication (CDR) technology to provide customised Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) aligning application recovery to business unit requirements.

Regular Disaster Recovery Testing

A key part of ensuring that a business can survive a disaster is regular testing of the disaster recovery plan. According to an independent research report,  almost a third of respondents reported that disaster recovery tests fail to meet Recovery Time Objectives and almost half of all organisations test their disaster recovery plans only once a year or less due to disruption to the business and lack of resources.

The Global Storage managed disaster recovery service eliminates these problems as all aspects of disaster recovery testing are managed by Global Storage. Global Storage is responsible for ensuring that the disaster recovery plan succeeds in meeting RTOs and RPOs and conduct regular testing of the disaster recovery plan. The testing guarantees minimal disruption to the business and ensures that customers and the organisation’s revenue generating activities are unaffected.

This regular testing along with guaranteed SLAs for the recovery of data provides businesses with the assurance that the disaster recovery plan will meet their businesses recovery time objectives.

Op-Ex Costing Model for Disaster Recovery

Global Storage managed services provides an easy entry into disaster recovery and other managed services with a monthly operational expenditure model that provides simple metrics around storage and server numbers. The service is paid for as a monthly charge and does not require upfront funding from a capital expenditure budget. This ‘pay as you go’ model makes implementing a disaster recovery strategy more achievable for many organisations, without any compromise on the quality of the disaster recovery solution.