Data Center Disaster Recovery: Disaster Recovery And Business Continuity Solutions For Your Busines

In today's world, it's no longer an option for any organization to be without a data center disaster recovery plan. Regardless of size, every company needs a strategy to keep networks, applications and data safe in an emergency whether it's a natural disaster like a hurricane, or a more ordinary event such as a power failure.

A serious event that interrupts normal business operations can happen at any time. Just watching the news the past few years underscores how quickly a weather disaster can take hold. Consider the following statistics regarding weather-related catastrophes alone:

-During the first half of 2010, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) declared 58 disasters in the United States. This number is in line to beat the current record of 75 FEMA-declared disasters in 2008.
-Also during the first six months of 2010, Wikipedia cites 1,071 tornadoes reported in the United States.
-According to FEMA, every state has experienced erratic and severe weather conditions during the past three years.

These dangerous weather trends have caused many businesses to take notice and evaluate their potential losses should a disaster strike. What if your business could not operate for a day, week or even month? For some companies, just a few hours of downtime can impact their very survival.

Even in the best of circumstances, data center disaster recovery is difficult. A system outage can interrupt access to your mission-critical applications and information such as customer records, email and other key business applications.

The Current State of Data Center Disaster Recovery

Although recent weather patterns suggest an increase in disasters, few small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have developed comprehensive continuity strategies. Several industry sources find the majority of SMBs do not recover after a catastrophe. Some surveys show up to 90% of SMBs fail within a year after suffering a major loss of data.

Unfortunately, the extent of many companies' data center disaster recovery involves making CD, DVD or tape backups. They may forgo comprehensive planning because of staffing or budget constraints. And, some companies set-up equipment and secondary data centers only after an event takes place.

Many of today's data center service providers offer affordable solutions based on industry best practices. Specialists exist to provide customized solutions to protect the data of all types of organizations.

Why Outsource Data Center Disaster Recovery?

Businesses often lack the necessary staffing, technical expertise and financial resources to execute successful disaster recovery and continuity plans. However, partnering with a data center service provider can make all the difference in maintaining a highly available infrastructure. A leading provider can assure your data, networks and systems are accessible at all times and protected from all possible threats.

Besides the obvious protections to your business operations, outsourcing data center disaster recovery provides an attractive value proposition. For example, companies choosing to outsource receive the following benefits:

-In most cases, outsourcing decreases operating costs over the long term by eliminating or reducing IT staffing requirements.

-A service provider's data center will usually be more robust than a SMB's internal capabilities. Advanced data centers leverage efficiencies in power, cooling and bandwidth.

-Outsourcing disaster recovery functions shifts time and resource requirements to the service provider and allows company personnel to focus on core business issues.

-By distributing IT functions across different regions, companies can reduce geographic risk in any one location.

-With certified experts on staff, data center service providers can give a depth and breadth of knowledge often unavailable in a SMB.

-Top level service providers use the most innovative tools and resources to address data center disaster recovery.

Who Should Outsource Data Center Disaster Recovery?

First and foremost, if you want to keep your business up and running in the face of any disruption, you're a good candidate for outsourcing disaster recovery. Other prospects for outsourcing include companies who:

-Want to better control and leverage IT investments and costs.
-Don't have the in-house expertise to manage disaster recovery.
-Have an IT staff already stretched too thin.
-Need to ensure a technical staff survives to continue business operations.

What a Qualified Service Provider Should Bring to the Table

With a thorough understanding of your business requirements, you can find a good match for a data center disaster recovery provider. You want a solution to address both business continuity and disaster recovery issues.

For example, a business continuity solution will ensure continuous availability and leverage redundant connectivity at multiple data centers. If an outage occurs at any data center, connectivity is re-directed to another location. Basically, your core operations will keep running.

Disaster recovery solutions promote efficient system, application or data restoration in time of crisis. You should expect physical and/or virtual connectivity through different data center facilities so you can easily back-up or store data in secondary locations. If an outage occurs at any data center, connectivity is re-directed to another location.

Whether using business continuity or disaster recovery services, a service provider's high availability infrastructure will protect your IT resources. An outsourcing relationship will maximize performance, minimize risk and ensure quick recoverability in the event of any outage.

Specific qualifications of a skilled disaster recovery service provider include:

-Certified experts operating in multiple and fully-featured data centers.
-Geographic diversity for maintaining system and data redundancy, and places systems in the best possible physical location for optimal performance.
-Physical and virtual connectivity among data centers.
-24x7x365 Monitoring services to provide multi-layered security and remote support as needed.
-Physical facility security combining mantraps, biometric identification systems and on-site security personnel.
-IP bandwidth available in different service levels across multiple ISPs.
-Built-in redundancy and reliability into all data center operating systems, including critical power and cooling infrastructure.
-A SAS70 Type II audit confirming the service provider's controls are operating effectively and securely.
-Technology-neutral data center design to leverage the best, leading-edge technologies as required.
-A Service Level Agreement (SLA) guaranteeing 100% data center availability and covering key elements and service metrics like power, temperature and network availability.
-Added safety features such as state-of-the-art fire detection, including VESDA and pre-action fire suppression equipment.
-Flexible contract terms tailored to each unique business situation and changing need.
-Transparent operations and core beliefs that fit well with your organization.
-A solid track record providing data center disaster recovery services to organizations similar to yours.

Nobody likes to think about bad things happening. But, it's much worse to be unprepared when they do. By proactively managing your critical information assets to survive a disaster, you'll get the peace of mind you deserve and an IT infrastructure robust enough to survive even the most harrowing disaster.