Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery [DR]

Sadly, events far less catastrophic than this can bring down a business in a remarkably short space of time. Where this can impact consumers and investors, companies are obliged by legislation to protect their data. BC from a storage perspective is a combined strategy to maintain availability of and access to data without disruption while disaster recovery is a measured approach to redundant architecture that enables the rapid return to a state of normal or near-normal business operations after a disaster event.

Is BC and DR really that important?

Alarmist suppliers will tell you ‘Of course’ but it’s as well to gain an understanding of the impact of loss of data (either temporary or permanent) on your business and how you would cope if the unthinkable did happen. Truly catastrophic events are thankfully rare but a disaster often far less dramatic in appearance can still have a massive effect on your business data.

For example, most organisations are content that regular backups are an adequate measure for BC and DR but very few actually test their backups on a regular basis or undertake failover tests to determine a well-documented operating procedure in the event of a disaster, which might even be just be a simple error.