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More About Disaster Recovery Plans

The cloud is currently the latest discussion in the IT industry. Enable companies to operate in a scalable virtual environment adapted to changing IT requirements as they grow without increasing capital investment in the IT infrastructure.

Most SMEs today rely on outdated disaster recovery strategies to keep their businesses running in the event of a system failure. While these strategies may work well enough, there are more robust and stable disaster recovery methods that can aid your business in dealing with disasters.

Common disaster recovery strategies

Your business today is most likely using a disaster recovery strategy that consists of backing up periodically to tape. This strategy uses regular backups of the entire system, daily incremental storage of changing or critical data tape, then storing those tapes off-site. In the event of a failure that requires the applications to be reloaded completely from the tape, your organization faces a significant downtime during the progress of data recovery. How much downtime can you stand up to? It all depends on the time it takes to repair or replace your devices, recover your data from tape, and manually rebuild all transactions since saving the last good tape.

This costs your company valuable time and money. Data recovery doesn’t have to mean your work is stopping. Here are some disaster recovery options that you may want to consider to reduce recovery time:

Journal – This IBM disaster recovery process monitors all changes to data and objects. In the event of a system failure, data can be recreated without manually re-enter the data. By using journaling, your business experiences have reduced recovery time.

Hard Disk Protection – In the event of a hard drive failure, this recovery option includes installing hard drives protected from parity or mirroring to avoid the risk of data loss.

Restore Services – Available on a subscription basis, these are third-party protected restore sites where data changes are transferred between tape stores, and backup tapes are restored to a similarly configured system. This system works as a backup system after the loss or failure of the production system.

High Availability – High availability consists of selecting a second machine as a backup system, allowing communication between that machine and the production machine, and then executing programs that copy all changes to the important objects in the production system to the backup system. When a system failure occurs, users are taken to this second computer to resume work without losing any data.

These are just a few examples of how you can reduce recovery time from events that can lead to unplanned downtime. When you choose an effective disaster recovery strategy for your company, you will experience reduced downtime and improved data protection. Ultimately, your business can continue to produce and make money.

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