What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?
Disaster recovery focuses on the IT systems that help support critical business functions. The term business continuity is often associated with disaster recovery, but the two terms are not completely interchangeable. Disaster recovery is a part of business continuity, which focuses more on keeping all aspects of a business running despite the disaster. IT systems these days are so critical to the success of the business, disaster recovery is therefore a main pillar in the business continuity process.
Why is it important to have a Disaster Recovery plan?
As technology plays more of a vital role in our organisations, uptime becomes more important. Could your business survive two hours of downtime? Probably. 4 hours? Maybe. How about 24 hours?
Most business functions are now dependent on IT. The sophistication of technology today means that customers have higher expectations than ever before as to how their product or services should perform. Your cost of downtime does not just include the profit you lose while you are offline, or the salaries you are paying despite operations being halted – the cost of reputational damage can extend much, much further. A recent report states that 44% of people would be put off using an organisation that had suffered a data breach. This highlights the importance of maintaining a strong reputation in uncertain times.
Recovering Your IT Infrastructure
True disaster will enable users within a business to be able to continue working, even if their servers and IT infrastructure is down. Typically, the way that a business will combat this is to have spare laptops ready for remote working, and have an on and offsite back up and disaster recovery solution in place.
The solutions that Cheeky Munkey put in place are ‘next generation’ with at least 256 bit encryption, allowing for a secure offsite, recreating the server environment for a business seamlessly, and efficiently. The recovery element is what makes a disaster recovery solution different from a simple backup product. Automated snapshots are taken of the infrastructure to ensure that we can go back to a specific moment in time before the incident and the business can be operational from there.
Once the disaster recovery has taken place, Cheeky Munkey assists in ensuring that users can interact with the system as they would expect to, specifically with being able to connect to all the resources, applications and files in the new hosted environment. Once the original environment is either fixed, replaced or workable, the system is then restored Cheeky Munkey assist the business in getting back to business as usual.
Disaster Recovery FAQ’s
If you have any queries about disaster recovery or need assistance in your business, contact us.