Disaster Recovery is essential for any business. We can help you prepare for disaster recovery in many ways, depending on the nature and size of your business. Below are some examples of how we can keep your business IN BUSINESS 24 hours a day.

 

What is Disaster Recovery?

We offer a business continuity solution designed to prevent data loss and keep business-critical applications available after server failures and serious disasters.

We combine real-time data replication and managed application delivery to mitigate business risk during a disaster. An evolution of disaster recovery that allows a business to be flexible enough to adapt to any IT based disaster, from single server failure to entire loss of premises.

 

How does it work?

 

Back End Infrastructure – Replication and Failover

 

This service incorporates a number of technologies to effectively replicate, in real time, your mission-critical servers to our recovery network located in highly connected, highly secure data centres. Your network is permanently connected to the recovery network via a dedicated VPN, and in the event of a critical service outage, you can invoke our service to failover a specific server to its replication partner. Equally, in the event of a complete site failure, you can invoke the service to failover your entire network to the replica network.

 

Front End Infrastructure – Application Publishing

 

Our service includes active directory integrated standby terminal servers within the recovery network. In the event of a complete site failure, we publish your replicated file data, applications, and email through a secure thin client portal which is accessible via the Internet. Upon invocation, an SMS message is sent to every employee with details of how to access the portal and login using their normal active directory username and password. Alternatively, if the applications are predominantly web-based customers can choose to have their recovery environment published through a web browser.

At such time when the source server becomes available, we fail-back the target network (or server) to the source environment. Only the byte-level changes are sent back, and disruption to users is minimal.

 

What are the benefits compared to traditional DR solutions?

 

Speed

 

Traditional disaster recovery solutions rely on restoring data from a backup, usually tape. Backups are typically taken daily, and therefore, this would result in the loss of up to 48 hours data and days or even weeks of hardware rebuilds, tape restores, frustrated users, and reputational damage. Building a network is a delicate and complicated procedure at the best of times; doing so under huge pressure and without identical equipment is an IT manager’s nightmare.

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On a full scale, emergency staff can easily work from home, or any location with an internet connection and work from there.

 

Testing

It is a well-known truth amongst IT professionals that restoring from tape is very rarely an entirely successful procedure; in the same survey, it was revealed that 98% of recoveries from tape resulted in problems. Verifying the integrity of the data with our system is far easier.

 

Modular

 

Traditional disaster recovery plans are typically designed to be invoked in the event of a serious disaster such as a flood or terrorist attack whereby the entire office is unavailable. In reality, a disaster could take the form of any core server failure. Our system is simple to invoke, and with low invocation expenditure, it can be used to cover single server failure.

 

SMS Notification

 

Common practise, even amongst banks, is to notify their staff of a disaster using ‘telephone trees’. Each person in the tree is responsible for notifying a pre-arranged group of people until the whole organisation is informed. In practise these are rarely effective, especially in larger organisations where the risk that someone cannot be contacted becomes greater. Often, if one person is not contacted the system fails.

When invoked, our system automatically sends an SMS message giving the required information to every user. Read receipts can also be used so that the organisation is aware of individuals that have not been informed.

 

Key Benefits

 

- No loss of data
- High speed invocation
- Modular delivery
- Simple SMS notification
- Easy to test and verify data integrity
- Lowered user impact