Disaster Recovery - Don't set it & forget it.
In the most part, when I speak with prospective clients and we inevitably cover the topic of the businesses Disaster Recovery (DR) Plan, everyone will state that they have a disaster recovery plan, and that everything is backed up.
The difference comes when we probe a little deeper with questions such as.
These questions are asked; not to catch you out, but to really bring it home that you may not be as prepared for a potential disaster as you may think.
This is the exact reason you bring in a team of IT experts, not to sit there passively dealing with issues as they arise, but to dig deep and question the methods and procedures implemented by others, to ensure the business is adequately prepared for all eventualities and my client is making an informed decision on the security of their business.
What is a disaster
It's best to take it back to basics initially and really outline what is the definition of a disaster in the business IT world.
In IT, a disaster can be any?unexpected problem that results in a slowdown, interruption or failure in a key system or network.
From the above definition we can see that disaster in the IT world can cover a broad spectrum of scenarios. For this reason there is no one solution that can protect the business entirely, but a combination of different methods working together to mitigate known risks and reduce negative business impact should the worst happen.
Resilience VS budget
We all want to protect our business as much as reasonably possible, but each step and solution you implement eats away at your annual IT budget, so allocating funds in the right areas is crucial to making your budget go as far as possible.
There will always be another step to take should you have a bottomless pit of cash, so set a budget and where possible stick to it.
Calculating downtime
To keep things simple lets say you are a law firm with 100 fee earners who charge their time out at ￡400/hr. So for every hour of downtime the business loses ￡40,000 in billable hours alone. There are lots of other factors that will effect the business financially, such as related catchup time, reputational damage and potential fines for missing deadlines or the breach of data security etc, but for the purposes of this exercise lets keep it simple and solely look at that ￡40k hourly loss.
So for every hour of downtime the business loses ￡40,000 in billable hours alone.
Now lets see what we can do to reduce your risk.
Microsoft 365
Lets start with the easy one. I think its safe to say 99% of businesses have a Microsoft 365 subscription. Typically within this subscription data is held in the following areas.
In just these four common areas sits a huge amount of data that you wouldn't want to lose or be without. The good news is its easy and cheap to protect this data.
Its a common misconception that this is automatically backed up by Microsoft, that is not the case. Microsoft do replicate the data and guarantee their services, but the data remains the responsibility of the user and Microsoft recommend using a third party provider to back this data up.
The solution
In partnership with industry leader Veeam, Nexus have created the Nexus Cloud Connect backup service for Microsoft 365. This products backups up all data within your 365 user subscription with no upper limits and endless retention, all from ￡3/user per month.
Microsoft Azure
Help your business to keep doing business, even during major IT outages.
Using Azure Site Recovery you can deploy a cost effective and dependable DR solution that offers ease of deployment, cost effectiveness, and dependability.
Deploy replication, failover, and recovery processes through Azure Site Recovery to help keep your applications keep running during planned and unplanned outages. For true resilience and disaster recovery protection there is no better place for your data than Azure. With the right team building your Azure environment you can take advantage of the many DR features that Microsoft offer.
The solution
The Azure Site Recovery suite allows you to manage your business continuity and disaster recovery solutions via the Azure portal, by keeping business apps and workloads running during outages.
Azure Site Recovery replicates workloads running on physical and virtual machines (VMs) from a primary site to a secondary location. When an outage occurs at your primary site, you fail over to the secondary location, and access apps from there. After the primary location is running again, you can fail back to it.
领英推荐
Understanding how your data is stored
Azure storage will synchronously?replicate your data across a minimum of three disks within the same data centre using local-redundant storage (LRS). This is a low cost option to protect your data and should be a bare minimum requirement. This protects against hardware failure within a specific server.
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) on the other hand, replicates your data synchronously across three data centres within a particular region. These data centres are physically separated but sit within the same region. This means that if there were to be an issue at one data centre, your data would be safe within another data centre in that region.
Geo-redundant storage (GRS) uses the same principal as ZRS but replicates the data to a data centre within a different region, which is often hundreds of miles away from the primary region. This offers the added layer of protection against large scale power outages and natural disasters.
Protecting an on-premise IT network
Where many businesses are taking a cloud first approach to their IT infrastructure there are still many on-premise IT networks in place.
This can be for a number of reasons, such as the hardware has not reached end of life yet, or the type of work undertaken by the business, such as design or video production makes working with local data much more efficient than in the cloud.
Whatever your reasoning for being on-premise we need to ensure you are aware of your vulnerabilities and the potential solutions available to the business.
The solution
Just because your IT infrastructure is on-premise, doesn't mean you cant take advantage of cloud technology. Nexus Cloud Connect (NCC) is designed from the ground up to be a fully automated and affordable solution with market-leading features.
The service features our 'total data protection' platform. It protects any physical machines, as well as virtual and cloud infrastructure running on VMware or Hyper-V. If disaster strikes and your business infrastructure fails, NCC can spin up a replica of lost servers, without the need for extra tools or additional costs usually associated with traditional cloud BCDR solutions.
Backups are created on a local Nexus Cloud Connect device (as often as every five minutes), which are also replicated to our secure cloud. This allows you to recover specific data quickly from multiple points in time, or use local virtualisation to restore a whole machine, or Nexus Cloud Connect virtualisation - or both - to get you back to business in minutes.
Don’t get caught out with hidden costs, you pay a fixed monthly fee –?no additional costs when things go wrong, everything is included in what you pay:
Connectivity resilience
Just when you thought you must have covered it all there is one more element to consider.
Internet connectivity underpins almost everything these days, and the same is true for business IT.
If your IT infrastructure is cloud based, you will rely heavily on your connection to that environment.
Even if your IT infrastructure is on-premise, you will still require internet access for your 365 apps, to send/receive email, to facilitate your offsite backup, and most likely to run your phone system.
Luckily the price of business grade internet connections is dropping year on year, making connectivity resilience achievable for everyone.
The solution
It's a simple solution, a primary and secondary/failover internet connection.
The preferred primary connectivity solution would be a leased line. Unlike a domestic broadband connection this is a dedicated connection to the business that has guaranteed speeds that do not fluctuate. Starting from 100mb up to 1000mb, Nexus can recommend the most appropriate connection to suit your needs. In addition, the speed quoted is the same for both upload and download.
The failover connection will also be a leased line from a different internet service provider (ISP), but typically will only deliver 50% of the bandwidth of your primary to ensure all core IT functions can continue to run whilst the primary connection fault is resolved.
For those that want no disruption at all, we will implement a secondary leased line that matches the primary leased line speed. Instead of the secondary being sat there and only used should the primary fail, Nexus will utilise both connections and balance the load over to expand your available bandwidth at all times. As these are from different providers it will mitigate the risk of losing connectivity.
Summary
Everything discussed in this article is a very high level view of the basics of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR). Your individual circumstances will always be discussed in depth before a solution is recommend. The purpose of this article was really to provoke the thought process of, if my IT network was destroyed by fire/flood or become encrypted by cyber criminals, what would be the next steps to return to business as normal.
Sadly its a very real situation that business owners find themselves in, so running through these scenarios annually is a powerful exercise. Just like a fire drill we hope you never need it; but when you do need it, you will be glad you are prepared and ready.
If you would like to discuss your current situation, please call/email/DM me, we can grab a coffee and see where Nexus can help.
Matt Cook - Business Development Manager
Office: 01392 684336 Mobile: 07812 205983 Email: [email protected]