When IT systems go down, operations grind to a halt. Hence the importance of good disaster recovery planning to be sure that business critical applications can be restarted as soon as possible, with any data loss remaining within acceptable limits. However, a little thought suggests that if you just bring things back to normal, you are still likely to be worse off than if you had had no disaster. Read more
How good must your disaster recovery be? “Good enough” is probably the best answer. Perfection is unlikely to be required, hospital operating rooms and nuclear power stations aside. The law of diminishing returns means that perfection or anything too close to it costs too much. Read more
Disaster recovery testing before an incident occurs is a must. Whether you test to check or test to improve, waiting until a catastrophe happens before unveiling your plan is a sure way to fail. However, a test environment is usually not a production environment. Read more
Governments often make legal requirements about things that could damage people’s health, whether in a physical, financial, or possibly other sense. Motor vehicles must be insured. Underage drinking is forbidden. Enterprises are required to meet health and safety standards for employees and visitors. Read more
Cloud-based disaster recovery has a lot going for it, including cost reduction for hardware, software, maintenance, and staffing. Not only can organisations avoid the large initial investments associated with traditional DR and the need to buy their own servers, data centre space, etc., they can also restrict much of their ongoing costs to what they use. Read more
“It won’t happen to me”. Just as some businesses persist in burying their head in the sand, when it comes to IT disaster recovery, many people turn a blind eye to the possibility of losing data on personal devices. The potential prejudice can go much further than losing your mobile phone contacts, especially now that personal devices like smartphones and tablets are now commonly used for professional purposes too. Read more
Three cheers for disaster recovery plan templates! Or should that be just two cheers? It’s a fact that good templates offer several advantages. Reduced time and effort are perhaps the most obvious. Read more
Disaster recovery has a cost, whether you measure it in money, time, or effort. It’s a cost that starts in the planning stage, before any disaster happens (hopefully), but it’s also supposed to be an investment or an insurance, in case something goes dramatically wrong. Read more
The new generation of data centres might just be like bacteria, splitting and doubling in number at frequent intervals, to create a host of smaller individual data centres instead of just one massive one. At least one data centre provider sees cloud computing as limited in terms of latency, making the “big data centre in the sky” with its 100-millisecond or more latency less suitable for certain applications, like real time control of machines. Other advantages include local data storage without the need to send high volumes of data over the net. But what about disaster recovery for this new plethora of data centres? Read more
In the past, computer systems were massive and made to last. The hardware cost more than the software, and while various processor, RAM, and hard drive upgrades happened from time to time, organisations never junked their investments; they amortised them. Read more