When things are going smoothly it’s easy to forget about the “What If’s”. But consider for a moment just how much critical information for your business is stored electronically. Your emails may contain important contracts and keep a record of correspondence. They also contain important email addresses and other contact details. You may have some form of database that contains critical sales transactions and customer details. And what about all of those files you have, word documents, excel spreadsheets, pictures and video?
Do you have working backups of this information? Are they stored offsite in case a disaster results in physical destruction of your IT systems?
Developing a backup strategy is the first step to ensuring the safety of your data. In order to develop the best solution for you we discuss your business with you and identify the programs and information you use. We then use the following metrics to determine a backup and DR strategy:-
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – How up to date must the restored data be. For example, you may be happy to have all emails restored that were on the system two days before the disaster. Meaning that you are comfortable with not having the most up to date emails as. However, you may need your customer database to be restored with the most up to date information.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – How long it will take to restore a particular IT system to an operational state. For email it may be acceptable for it to take a couple of days, for your customer database it may be acceptable for 1 day, for files it may be acceptable for the restore to take a week.
RPO and RTO determine the backup strategies that are used and the cost of the backup systems.
In 2011 a number of businesses experienced a real disaster scenario during the Brisbane floods.
Don’t forget about the What If’s, ensure your data is safe and can be restored in the event of a disaster bycontactingLegitIT.
