by Mark Phillippi
While the chance your business will be affected by a major natural disaster or terrorist attack is slim, other causes of unplanned downtime such as a hardware component failure, fire, power outage or surge, network attack or even human error are more prevalent. It is important to ensure your company has a reliable strategy for getting the business up and resuming normal business operations, no matter what the cause. Without a disaster recovery strategy the consequences to your business could be paramount. According to the Wall Street Journal, 92 percent of small businesses that experience significant data loss due to a major disaster go out of business within five years. You don't want to become part of this statistic.
With mission-critical data growth exploding in the small to midsized enterprise (SME) market-much of it on the edge of the network in branch offices-traditional disaster recovery solutions may not be enough to ensure business continuity throughout your entire organization.
Complete Restoration Disaster Recovery
In order to protect all company data regardless of physical location and to ensure business continuity across the entire organization, SMEs need to deploy a complete disaster recovery solution that integrates local backups and remote off-site vaulting in a single solution. Using a complete and integrated solution allows your organization to restore entire systems quickly, and get them back in the production environment as soon as possible after experiencing downtime. A complete bare metal restoration solution restores systems from the ground up-including the operating system (Windows, Linux, Solaris, etc.), business applications (Exchange, SQL, Oracle, Novell, etc.), user profiles and data files, in addition to reformatting drives.
The following details what SMEs should look for in a complete disaster recovery solution that protects their data center as well as data and systems in remote offices.
Quick Recovery
When it comes to quick recoveries and an SME's ability to resume normal business operations after experiencing downtime, the stakes couldn't be higher. Simply put, if customers are inconvenienced by not being able to visit a retail location, access a Website, email a sales rep, or receive requested information in a timely manner-regardless of the reason-they will move on to a competitor. The availability of services and products at headquarters and in branch offices is absolutely vital to the health of the company, making quick restoration of the IT systems that run the business a top priority. Minutes do matter.
Most SMEs do not realize that quick restores not only rely on recovering lost data, but also rely on rebuilding damaged or lost servers and workstations. Operating systems need to be restored, drives need to be reformatted, business applications need to reinstalled, data needs to be recovered and user profiles need to be restored. End users cannot do their job unless workstations and servers are returned to their normal state before downtime occurred. This takes time.
The most effective disaster recovery solutions speed up the systems recovery process by automating this process through scripting. Automatic bare metal restore allows administrators to perform a complete systems restoration to an existing system or to a new system with different hardware. While it typically takes a seasoned IT veteran a full day or longer to completely restore a system manually, there are disaster recovery solutions that allow staffers with little IT training to recover a complete system in less than an hour.
Off-Site Backups and Vaulting
In an effort to protect against data center outages and regional natural disasters, it is essential that SMEs implement off-site backups and a remote vaulting system that store data and system information at least 150 miles away. Tape rotation at a warehouse across town, a common approach of SMEs, does not provide the same level of off-site protection since the facility will most likely be impacted by the same disruption. The best backup and recovery solutions incorporate both local and off-site backups in one package. After first performing a local backup in the branch office, the solution replicates data to an off-site location where it is stored in a data vault and is easily recoverable.
Because bandwidth and server requirements could affect performance for end users, it is essential that SMEs deploy a solution that incorporates electronic data synchronization to off-site vaults. By only sending data that is new or has changed since the last backup, the solution requires less resources and dramatically reduces the amount of data that has to be sent over the WAN. This allows backups to be completed more quickly, efficiently and reliably. In the same vein, synchronization technology enables administrators to pause and re-engage in the middle of a backup if a connection is disrupted during the data transfer, preventing administrators from ever having to manually restart a transfer.
Vendor Neutral
When a disaster hits and remote offices are pulled off-line, SMEs don't always have the luxury of being able to replace their servers with the exact model or even the same brand. Often, they must make a quick replacement with what is available. Because of this, it is important that the company's disaster recovery solution is able to restore systems to different hardware. For example, an HP server needs to be able to be restored on a Dell box if that is what is available. This also gives SMEs flexibility with their purchasing decisions, allowing them to choose hardware that is the best suited for specific business needs and budget rather than letting interoperability inhibit choice.
Point-in-Time Recovery
Giving customers the ability to restore systems to a set point in time is an essential element of a complete disaster recovery solution. This is especially useful if a single system crashes and a database needs to be synched up with other end users. Email is another example. Point-in-time recovery allows administrators to recover deleted emails or files as needed or restore systems to a point in time within the past 30 days.
Simple Management
Most SMEs do not have the IT and staffing resources to dedicate to backup management and monitoring, making it essential that any disaster recovery solution be easy to use and automate as much manual process as possible. This is especially true on the edge of the network in branch offices where often there is no full-time IT administrator and a business staff member is typically tasked with starting the backup process each night.
It doesn't have to be this way. SMEs can make sure their disaster recovery solution is managed consistently from a central management console, giving a trained and dedicated administrator at headquarters complete access and visibility into the backup cycle. In addition, the solution needs to automate basic tasks, including the recovery process. This can help streamline IT management, prevent human errors and take business continuity responsibility off the shoulders of untrained business staff.
Scalability
Complete restoration solutions also need to be scalable to allow SMEs to expand their disaster recovery strategy in line with the business. It seems strange to think that a company can over-protect its IT systems, but it is nearly impossible to protect every server all of the time. SMEs need to determine what systems need to be protected and how fast they need to be recovered. Deploying a scalable disaster recovery solution that is flexible is a good start, as growing companies' needs can change quickly.
Some providers price their solutions on a per gigabyte of user data basis in conjunction with time-to-recovery needs. This ensures that SMEs are getting exactly what they require at an affordable price and that the IT budget is directly tied to the needs of the business.
Security
Another feature that SMEs may need is encryption technology that secures data as it is in transit and while being backed up and restored. Industry and government regulations are getting tighter every year, forcing companies-especially growing businesses-to plan for future compliance requirements, making it essential that all sensitive data is properly encrypted from the outset.
It is vital that SMEs take into account remote office computing when implementing their business continuity strategy, relying on a robust and complete disaster recovery solution that enables efficient backups and quick restores. Administrators need to ensure that they are able to manage the backup and recovery process from a central location, conduct complete restorations and recover systems to different hardware. Only then can SMEs be truly prepared for whatever Mother Nature throws their way.
Revenue
While the need to back up remote data and branch office systems off site exists, SMEs don't always have the resources to deploy and maintain a remote disaster recovery site that is distant enough to provide protection from regional disasters. Systems integrators who already maintain large, centralized data centers can fill this niche. Given the right tools, systems integrators can establish a disaster recovery service that backs up data locally each night and replicates that data to an off-site disaster recovery site managed by a knowledgeable, dedicated IT staff.
The key to implementing a successful off-site vaulting managed service is finding the right solution to make remote backups efficient enough that bandwidth and storage costs don't cancel the margins. As stated in this article there are reliable disaster recovery solutions specifically designed for remote SME environments. In addition to the requirements discussed in the main article, make sure the solution leverages block-level backups, only backing up data that has been changed or created since the last backup. In this way, you can eliminate redundant data going over the WAN, saving bandwidth and shortening the backup cycle.
Managing customers' off-site vaulting in an efficient and reliable manner is a service that could prove highly profitable for systems integrators, especially when they already possess most of the resources required to offer the service. It not only generates additional revenue and increases margins but positions them as a full-service disaster recovery service provider and closely ties their business with the needs of their customers.
Mark Phillippi is vice president of technology and product management for Unitrends.
www.unitrends.com
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