Member Article

It will never happen to me: disaster recovery

In the wake of Thursday’s severe flooding in parts of the North East of England, Russell Henderson of SITS Group, a Newcastle-based firm of cloud computing specialists, expands on disaster recovery and how it is no longer the exception, but is fast becoming the norm for SME’s.

“It will never happen to me” – this is a phrase which business are increasingly less likely to count on, particularly in light of the recent floods which hit the North East showing that the unexpected can happen; with wide spread disruption for businesses, commuters, charities and emergency services, all due to flooding in what should be a sunny June.

But disaster need not always strike. Cloud infrastructures provide businesses with a method of delivering cost effective disaster recovery solutions, meaning that businesses no longer need to buy double the amount of server hardware to have a failover environment ready to be used; this means that the option of having a disaster recovery strategy in place is now real for many more SME’s than ever before.

Furthermore, the process of testing or actually recovering virtual servers in a private or hybrid cloud environment is simple compared to physical server recoveries, it genuinely takes minutes to recover systems, not hours or days. This allows businesses to test their disaster recovery processes with very little associated time and cost to ensure the processes work as required should they ever be called upon.

These types of disaster recovery solutions lend themselves to all different scales of businesses, from a single server protecting four or five critical business servers, to a cloud solution offering protection for all business systems at costs far lower than was previously possible before virtualisation technology arrived.

Historically businesses invested in disaster recovery solutions, some as a tick box exercise for insurance purposes, others truly deployed solutions to recover the business should the worst happen; most of these businesses shared the same fear, the cost and disruption of testing the solutions was greater than the fear of not testing.

Today’s cloud solutions allow businesses to be reassured that their investments in protecting themselves, their customers and their suppliers actually work. We have deployed many cloud solutions of varying scales to many clients over years and around 95% of them included a disaster recovery solution. In conclusion, disaster recovery is no longer the exception; it is fast becoming the norm.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by SITS Group .