Implementing a low cost DR Strategy
Running on a tight budget? Here are some ideas to consider.
Despite of the magnitude a disaster can cause, user expectations regarding the speed and seamlessness of the recovery effort have undoubtedly increased. Unfortunately IT budgets have not increased significantly to cater for these recovery efforts, nonetheless there are a few ideas and solutions that can help. Here are five steps IT professionals should consider to cut disaster recovery costs when designing or updating their DR strategy.
How can this be achieved?
- Understand the recovery need: The most important way to reduce disaster recovery costs is to fully understand what needs to be recovered should there be a disaster occurrence. This can be done by establishing a recovery point objective and recovery time objective for each application so that your organization can build an optimal data recovery plan. However, when doing analysis, it is important to put unstructured data in consideration.
- Draft a Detailed Documentation on Network Infrastructure: A step-by-step guide on network configurations will surely assist with the execution of the DR procedure. A comprehensive blueprint of your organization's current network infrastructure guarantees a proper rebuilding and recovery of the entire system. Furthermore, the detailed documentation raises your chances of a successful reconstruction of corrupted network infrastructure. Lastly, it's advisable to keep all the documents offline and in a private cloud for safety and easy access in times of a disaster.
- Count on virtualization: Even if the primary data center is not 100% virtualized, at least the DR site should be virtualized. A virtualization solution can keep server costs at a minimum and in addition cut back on capacity requirements by allowing the DR storage system to support deduplication and compression. Virtualization has another key benefit which is making testing of the DR plan far more easier and IT planners can create virtual isolated test networks and enable DR copies of applications without impacting production.
- Consider disaster recovery as a service: Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) takes the idea of a virtualized DR site to the extreme. Instead of just backing up data to the provider's cloud only, the DRaaS solution allows an organization to also instantiate virtual machines in the cloud, taking advantage of the computing power to enable rapid recovery. DRaaS cuts back the costs of building a separate DR site for an organizations, as well as the expense of equipping that DR site with servers, storage and personnel.
In conclusion, DR expectations are higher than ever. Users want the IT staff to make any recovery happen quickly, perfectly and for less money. Understanding your organizations applications and data is the vital first step in reducing disaster recovery costs, minimizing the outlay of capital in the subsequent ideas mentioned above.
Interested? Talk our experts today for more!