Almost every company today depends heavily on technology. From the tablets your employees have in the field, to the VoIP systems that allow you to communicate internationally, technology is simply a part of our lives. Technology can also be useful in your disaster recovery planning efforts as well. The problem, however, is that it can either help or hinder your efforts, but planning ahead and creating an architecture that simplifies, consolidates and standardizes your technology makes it a much easier recovery situation for you in the long run.
The Technologies You Know
You may already have a data backup system, and while that can be useful in a document, file or application recovery effort, you could certainly take things one-step further. Thanks to clustering and similar technologies, you have more opportunities to back up and extend replication between systems and sites. This is now becoming commonplace, facilitated by virtualized storage and processing.
Remote access may already be something you take advantage of, but it can help in disaster recovery planning, too. This technology can enable your process by permitting rapid access to your recovery site and recovery management processes. These systems help you further by allowing your users to assist with the recovery and minimize lost time, errors and data loss in the event of a disaster.
Moving Forward
Companies that have begun to do advanced planning for a disaster may already be backing up, but perhaps that data isn’t moved off-site until the end of the next day or possibly even the end of the week. If you really want to move forward with your planning efforts, it’s time to use virtualization, in both storage and processing, to consolidate and replicate between your sites so you can easily move to your recovery facility with all of your information synched and ready to go. Want to take things one step further? Go with active recovery technologies that help you manage, monitor, and track synchronization on a daily basis. Most of these have the ability to automate most processes so you don’t have to worry about it on a day-to-day basis.
To be truly ready for a disaster, you need to carefully plan, design, and promote recovery efforts and technologies throughout your company so that when something does happen, you’re ready.
