Disaster Recovery: Don't Forget the Small Things

Downtime is something all businesses strive to limit as costs inflicted upon businesses during downtime are significant. Disaster recovery strategies could ease that burden. Even when an outage is limited to a single service, all users can be negatively impacted. What should a disaster recovery strategy look like if it’s going to be effective?

The Broad Focus

It’s possible that some organizations are getting hit hard because their focus is too broad when it comes to protecting themselves from downtime. They’re looking at the biggest possible events that could take down their ability to operate as usual, missing out on the myriad of small things that could create a problem that turns into something larger.

Smaller outages must be accounted for in any disaster recovery strategy. It’s the micro-outages that add up over time, which means all that effort spent on creating a prevention program over something big is only one part of your planning.

Back It Up

Not only does your data related to key systems need to be backed up, it should be continuously backed up. In the best-case scenario, the data is backed up in the cloud, remotely, so that if a natural (or unnatural) disaster occurs in your location, your data will be safe.

You also need flexibility, which is why the best disaster recovery strategies take into account snapshot-based and incremental backups. This gives you the ability to make a quick recovery from any type of downtime issue. Sometimes, it’s not the primary system that goes down, which is why it makes sense to account for peripheral outages.

Reacting to an Event

Some would say that regardless of your preventative measures, you’re still going to get hit with downtime at some point. They might be right, which doesn’t preclude proactive measures, but proper planning also takes into account the worst-case scenario.

When a disaster is detected, there must be a preplanned failover process already devised that will set you back into action, quickly. In many cases, this means assigning tasks to unaffected servers. Failback also deservers a look here: once you’ve confirmed the problem and fixed it, all necessary services need to revert back seamlessly.

Due to the fact that only about 40 percent of organizations are making their availability standards, taking another look at disaster recovery efforts is required. At AMD Technology, we’ve saved clients millions of dollars in IT costs, but we do more than just that – we’re able to provide cutting edge services that keep our clients from experiencing the negative effects of downtime. Contact us today to discuss how our solutions will be a good fit for your company.