Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 17 | Page 37

INTELLIGENT DATA CENTRES Far from being a nice to have or a sign of excessive caution, disaster recovery is a business imperative. there, work out what your ideal recovery targets would be for these apps and processes. Running through some hypothetical scenarios might be helpful. How much data loss can you handle? How quickly do you need to be back up and running? How much would downtime cost the firm, in terms of output and broader consequences? All of these questions will help to define the recovery time objectives for the business and the best approach as a result. A huge point that is often overlooked is that just having a disaster plan is not enough. You should look to regularly test the viability and quality of your backups to be certain they are completely recoverable, that the plan will function as expected and all data is where it needs to be; off-site, for example. The last thing you want during a disaster is to find that the plan has not been completely implemented or run in months, or worse, discover there are workloads which are not recoverable. It is critical that businesses resist the temptation to bury their heads in the sand when it comes to disaster recovery. IT outages can happen to anyone and IDC estimates that 80% of businesses that do not have a disaster recovery plan will simply fail when one takes place. When it comes to your data and IT services, there is a significant risk a business may never recover if it is not adequately prepared. We live in a digitally transformed world and many businesses cannot operate without the availability of systems and data. These simple points listed above can bring about the resiliency organisations need to effectively handle disasters, and prove their reliability to the customers they serve. So, while the full value of DRaaS might not be realised immediately, the right disaster recovery plan could prevent an outage from becoming a catastrophe for your business.  37