why-you-need-a-disaster-recovery-plan

What’s all the fuss about disaster recovery or as the techies like to call it DR? Well, there could be several right answers but these three will do – business continuity, reputation, and data integrity. DR involves setting up a plan to replicate server and data storage at a secondary site to enable smooth recovery in case of disruption to primary production operations.

An enterprise disaster recovery plan is key to ensuring there’s a known and established fail-over in case of disaster striking from a variety of possible sources such as natural disasters, equipment failure or even cyber-attacks. A properly developed DR plan will provide a clear assessment of risks and their impacts and countermeasures, what operations are critical and a backup policy as well as consideration of data integrity, retention and compliance among other aspects.

An enterprise DR can be set up in several ways or combine several methods which may include;

• Hot site DR – requires continuous replication of production infrastructure and minimises downtime the most.
• Cold site DR – may be set up off-site to replicate the primary production infrastructure.
• Backup – involves data recovery and does not necessarily provide for infrastructure recovery.
• DR-as-a-Service – involves a third-party provider setting up DR infrastructure that can provide fall-back for an organisation when required. Often this is cloud-hosted in a subscription pay-per-use model.
• Backup-as-a-Service – involves a third-party, typically cloud provider, providing data backup capability for an organisation in a pay-per-use model.
• Off-site datacentre DR – involves utilising colocation datacentre providers to set up the DR site which may be set up as a cold or hot site.

Every organisation should have a DR plan especially now that servers are taking on increasingly critical business applications and operations. The DR plan should be set up for people with technology as a support pillar.

At Mjenzi Cloud, we can help your organisation develop and implement your DR plan, the way that best suits your workload and your people to assure business continuity, reputational excellence and data integrity. We can help you build your DR server in-house, off-site at a chosen datacentre or utilise our cloud services to deploy a backup or DR plan. We are contactable on cloud@mjenzi.com today.

IBM provides a sample of a DR plan here https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.3?topic=system-example-disaster-recovery-plan.