Disaster Recovery

Total Peace of Mind

Technology and telecommunications systems are becoming increasingly important for businesses to perform their most basic business functions. Disruptive events, such as natural disasters, intentional or unintentional errors in human judgment and vulnerabilities in computing hardware or software, can be so disastrous and debilitating to a business that it renders itself inoperable.

With a rising number of threats and an intense competitive business landscape, it is becoming increasingly important that your organisation have the ability to withstand a disaster.  Certain organisations also have implied legislative requirements to fulfil various disaster recovery and business continuity obligations often resulting in additional costs and complexities. 

Research shows that of those businesses that spend less than 5% of their IT budget on disaster recovery strategies, less than 50% are likely to reopen or remain in business within 2 years of experiencing a major loss of business information and less than 6% will survive long term. (Jim Hoffer, Backing Up Business – Industry Trend or Event).

As such, the need to implement a Disaster Recovery Plan to protect business information and core technology platforms are becoming an increasing priority for many businesses that want to operate in the unfortunate event that a disaster occurs.

What is Business On-Demand Disaster Recovery?

Disaster Recovery is the process, policies, procedures and systems a business implements to enable it to continue its core business functions in the event that a disaster occurs. Our Business On-Demand Disaster Recovery service includes a comprehensive, documented and tested Disaster Recovery Plan for the resumption of business information, software applications, hardware and data communications.

With Business On-Demand, all your business information, software applications, hardware and data communications are stored and managed from our fully meshed, highly secure and fully redundant Data Centres. You can now benefit from enterprise grade Disaster Recovery services that otherwise might not have been affordable to you previously.

Disaster Recovery is all about planning and having a sound strategy for data protection. Our Disaster Recovery plan is relatively simple. Your data is stored within our Data Centres and we adhere to industry best practices for Disaster Recovery using the latest and most reliable technology, systems and procedures.

Backups

We have a multi-layered approach to Back Ups enabling our Disaster Recovery service to recover from multiple levels of failure. At regular intervals, we take snapshot images of servers enabling us to quickly recover data and applications to “specific points in time”. We employ the highest levels of fault tolerance including local mirroring of systems and data and use disk protection technologies such as RAID and clustering. Data is backed up to a local Storage Area Network (SAN) and replicated to SAN’s contained within our other Data Centres. All data traverses our fully messaged and highly redundant High Availability Network. Backups are made to tape and sent off-site at regular intervals.

Server Farm - Load Balanced Infrastructure

Our Data Centres provide High Availability through the logical allocation of Hardware resources to different users, minimising the impact of a hardware failure or disaster. Multiple servers are grouped together.  Applications can be configured to be delivered from all servers in the farm or any subset easily from the application publishing allowing for simple load balancing across the available platforms.

Virtualisation Infrastructure

Traditional disaster recovery plans require many manual, complex steps to allocate recovery resources, perform bare metal recovery, perform data recovery, and validate that systems are ready for use. Our Infrastructure service eliminates many steps in the process and simplifies the recovery process. 

Virtualisation removes the need to have the correct hardware configuration, patches and firmware in place and eliminates the challenges associated with recovering the operating system and installing applications on different hardware.

Virtualisation converts a traditional Disaster Recovery Process and environment, including hardware configuration, firmware, operating system install and application install, into data stored in just a few files on disk. Protecting a complete system is just a matter of protecting a few files using backup and replication software. The files that comprise a virtual machine can be recovered to any hardware without requiring any changes because virtual machines are hardware-independent. Servers can be reprovisioned in minutes not days in the event of a physical layer failure.
 
Ensure Reliable Recovery

Having a reliable Disaster Recovery plan is important if the Disaster Recovery Process is to work efficiently. Traditional recovery plans are often unreliable because they are difficult to test; difficult to keep up to date; and depend on correct execution of complex and manual recovery processes. 

Testing becomes simpler in a virtualised environment because virtualisation makes it possible to execute non-disruptive tests using existing resources. Hardware independence eliminates the complexity of maintaining the recovery site by eliminating failures due to hardware differences that can otherwise creep in over time and cause costly and time consuming complications during recovery. Recovery procedures are simplified to eliminate failures caused by the complexity of traditional disaster recovery solutions.

What are the Benefits of Business On-Demand Disaster Recovery?

Our Disaster Recovery plan is relatively simple. Your data and applications are stored and managed from our fully meshed, highly secure and fully redundant Data Centres. You can now benefit from enterprise grade Disaster Recovery services that otherwise might not have been affordable to you previously.

Reduce the Cost of Disaster Recovery

With traditional disaster recovery solutions, having the fastest and most reliable recovery requires duplicating your entire production infrastructure and with it your costs. Using Virtualisation Infrastructure you can provide rapid and reliable recovery without requiring identical hardware. Because of hardware independence, you can repurpose existing servers for disaster recovery rather than needing to buy duplicate servers for rapid recovery.  Virtualisation also enables server consolidation so that organizations can slash the cost of server infrastructure needed both for production and disaster recovery.

Meeting Your Time-to-Recover Goal

Our procedures are clear and our staff trained to perform the functions required in the event of a disaster 24 hours a day. We have a team that is responsible for overall coordination of the restoration activities including prioritisation of systems to be restored. In the event that a particular team leader is unavailable, an alternate team leader will participate.