Most organizations today realize that a disaster recovery (DR) plan is vital for their continuous survival. Every organization needs a disaster recovery plan to protect the business in the event of a disaster. However, enforcing a DR plan involves considerable time, attempts, and investment in emerging technical areas within the organization.
What is Disaster Recovery?
Organizations use this process to recover the software, data or hardware to resume normal functioning and performance of business systems after the unwanted hacking or threatening activity. Disaster recovery plans focus on bridging the gap wherein the damage has been done. Every organization should have a disaster recovery plan to help know how they will cope with the loss of data and how to recover it. The IT industry has many companies that provide disaster recovery plans and here we have compiled some of the vital questions that your business should ask before deciding on the provider to pick from the wide array available.
1. Consider companys needs
Understanding what other components you will need to recover your data even after losing it is important. Look for an all-in-one solution where backup and recovery will try to get you back whatever has been lost. Will the solution involve replicating your servers and protecting your data? Also, take into consideration the hosting capabilities that will be available and provided to you. There should be a cloud-based disaster recovery be offered to allow for faster recovery.
2. Recovery and point objective
Recovery time objective (RTO) is the maximum length of time a system can be down after failure before the company is negatively impacted by the downtime while Recovery point objective (RPO) specifies a point when a data recovery and backup begins. These two objectives will help your organization and the provider understands what to expect in case of a disaster.
3. Frequent Testing
The provider should provide low cost flexible testing, at least annually, to determine how quickly the systems can recover from a major disaster. This will also allow for the personnel in charge of the test run to familiarize with the systems. The ability of the organizations system to handle recovery should also be considered. The time taken for restoration of critical data should be measured.
4. ISO certified data center
Is the provider ISO 9000 certified? Certifications are given to legit and approved at centers so be on the lookout for some the following certifications. The Statement for Attestation Engagement (SSAE16) that measures the controls and operating effectiveness of data centers. There are also three new Service Organization Controls i.e. SOC 1 is a report that measures the controls of a data center as relevant to financial reporting. SOC 2 assesses IT and data center service providers controls and SOC 3 bears an auditors opinion about providers of data center service with an additional seal of approval that confirms that hosting has examined and compliant data center.
5. Physical location of the data centers and Technologies in place
A data center located in a disaster free zone should be your first option. Natural disasters happen almost all the time and so ask about the location of the servers and consider areas in terms of natural disasters. What precautions have been put into place to manage these risks? Is there good physical security and controlled access to the facility?
When moving data from your center to the providers data center, you should get an overview of how the data is moved. If it involves huge volumes of data, what packages are on offer? After a disaster has occurred, data will need to be sent back to you as the client so ask how this will be done. Will it be over the connections or is there a physical means that the data can be brought to you?
Other questions that you should keep in mind are on the security, privacy, compliance and reduplication of data. You do not want to back up the same files across multiple volumes or large volumes of uncompressed data that will increase network traffic.
6. Immediate support
How many customers does the company have? What happens if several customers declare emergencies faced by the same disaster? Does the provider have enough staff to cater for the customer needs and to ensure the most critical data is recovered so that the companies affected are up and running as soon as possible?
7. Affordable Service
Compare the cost of different disaster recovery providers before coming to a decision. Will the cost be more than the operational costs of an in-house configuration? Will the provider help you consolidate and reduce costs on resources in production and recovery? In addition, a provider that will provide an option to increase convenience and lower costs through remote access should be considered.
8. Platform Compatibility
Does the provider support your configurations? For example, your company may run operating systems such as Linux, diversified storage, and Windows plus applications such as emails, databases and directories coupled by physical and virtual environments. In other words, you should find a provider who can support the type of configurations for your organization.
Conclusion
Disaster recovery is best policy and thus very important for survival of business in scenarios where a natural disaster occurs. It is up to you to research well and find a palatable provider who will provide high quality service and expertise to meet your specific business requirements in the ever-competitive market.
