The Business Exchange Swindon & Wiltshire Edition 37: June/July 2018 | Page 25

TECHNOLOGY Aiming for a speedy recovery By Gareth Johnson, CIS Taking into consideration what data you have backed up and how quickly you can restore it following an outage should be high on your list of priorities, says Gareth Johnson. 24/7 availability is something we all take for granted these days both as business owners and consumers of IT. But what price do we put on getting there? It’s no longer just enough to be able to say you have plans in place for the recovery of data, particularly when dealing with customers in real time. After all, being able to restore data sets that are several hours old might leave you falling short with both the regulator and your customers in terms of service level agreements (SLAs). Putting it another way, do you know when your data was last backed up and how quickly you could access it in the advent of a problem? And if you had to, could you restore it within minutes and seconds? Where once these questions were reserved for banks and financial institutions, today they are being asked of firms of all sizes and this brings new problems for SMEs and those businesses that have lacked the scale and resources to deploy such solutions. Thankfully help is at hand for firms that require enterprise class protection at a fraction of the cost through solutions such as Veeam Cloud Connect. Indeed, those with less than 250 employees and virtual environments with up to six CPU sockets can now expect the same kind of cover. That means recovery time (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data. What’s more is that these new solutions are designed to grow with you as a business and can be deployed in various ways depending on your size and strategy. As a Veeam Partner, CIS is helping to provide businesses with a secure repository for their data and managing their backups to mitigate against data loss. This, in turn, is helping enterprises to scale more effectively regardless of environment or size. Yet, the options can seem confusing. In terms of business continuity planning what best suits your set-up? Would you benefit from cloud backup and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)? Is your business better suited to a hybrid strategy of on-premise teamed with cloud options? Whether you are looking for fully managed IT support that supports your storage and disaster recovery strategy or advice and delivery around business continuity planning, you should always speak to an expert. They will be able to tell you what best suits the needs of your business in terms of optimised IT footprint and spend, leaving you one less thing to worry about. With a vast number of considerations and options available when it comes to disaster recovery, business continuity planning and the various managed services around this, CIS has been delivering trusted impartial advice for over 25 years. For more information visit: www.cisltd.com or email: [email protected] THE BUSINESS EXCHANGE 2018 25