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Disaster recovery: But why do you need it?

Read this blog to know why disaster recovery is useful.

Abhideep Roy 1 Stories

Sunday March 11, 2018 , 2 min Read

A recent study has found that man-made disasters affect almost 10 percent of the smaller businesses but the same study says that a large percentage of them are affected by natural disasters. It is easy to imagine the impact of a power outage on your business.

In a recent study, it has been found that hardly 6 percent of the companies suffering from a serious disaster survive. A large, almost 43 percent don’t see the world again. And an even significant number almost 51 percent close within two years.

So why do you need a DR solution?

Although modern technology systems are fairly resistant to failures, there is no device that may fall short of failure. It may be costly for your company to eliminate the single point of failure in the IT infrastructure, but with the help of the disaster recovery plans, you may remain assured that a hardware failure is not causing any losses. Rather than building your data-centre, you may choose to outsource disaster recovery solutions as a service to an outsourcing partner.

But how will you know that your solution is the best?

Yes, you need to know few basics of how these solutions work and how do they deliver the results. Here are two metrics that are widely used to judge the efficiency of the services.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - It the measure of how much time between the moment of disaster and the time user may be able to work again.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – How far back in time you may go if at all the disaster happens. And how much data (read transactions) you are ready to lose without losing on the continuity of the business?

These metrics are measured in minutes, or the hours or days. They are directly related to the criticality of the IT processes and the data. So if you want to lower the RTO and the RPO, the cost for the disaster recovery solution will be higher.

What are various kinds of recovery sites?

There are three kinds of sites that are available, and you should know which sites will be the most suitable for you. First is a cold site, another is the warm site, and then there are geographically dispersed sites that are highly available.