Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

Although disasters of the magnitude of Buncefield Oil Depot (December 2005) do occur and due to their spectacular nature are very well reported, the chances of such a disaster happening to your business are very slim. This does not mean that major disaster recovery should not be considered, but more likely to be encountered by your business as a lesser incident or incidents that the business will need to recover from in an unspectacular way. The ultimate goal being the ability of the business to continue to service the needs of its customers at a level that will ensure long term viability.

These incidents can cover a plethora of scenarios of differing magnitudes including:

Simple hardware failure
Prolonged loss of power
Local incident preventing access to premises
Fire or flood
Health epidemic

We are constantly told prevention is better than cure, and this is no different in the world of IT systems. Disaster Recovery (DR) is only part of a Business Continuity strategy, so we need to think of the bigger Business Continuity picture before focusing on DR.

Before you go any further you need to consider these two acronyms and quantify them for your business:

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - the time the business can tolerate being without the service
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - the point in time the business would find acceptable to fall back to, if a problem occurred

Somewhere in the range from completely replicating the business on the other side of the world to doing nothing, there is an appropriate solution for any business, to meet your specific needs.

Why EACS?

EACS has a history of deploying cost-effective solutions covering all levels of  Business Continuity requirements. From providing Continuous Availability servers offering zero downtime and uninterrupted processing with no loss of user service in your local environment, through midrange clustering style, failover solutions offering high - but not continuous – availability, to offsite managed hosting of replicated servers for more serious incident recovery.  

Increasingly, virtualisation solutions are playing a part in enabling DR solutions and a combination of the appropriate technologies from EACS can provide your business with a highly effective Business Continuity strategy at reasonable cost.

For more information on Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery contact us.