Vox Telecom has urged business owners of organisations both big and small, to critically review their backup and disaster recovery requirements, to ensure that they are not left exposed should there be a service outage.
“Backup and recovery services are under-rated in the local market, and it leaves businesses, and their mission critical data exposed,” says Justin Elms, senior product manager for Infrastructure Services at Vox Telecom.
Understanding that there are multiple options available when it comes to recovery, is one way in which businesses can evaluate their requirements. For instance does your business need to recover and restore single files, folders or bare metal recovery?
Adds, Elms, “Bare metal recovery allows for a complete server to be restored in a single process, including the operating system, applications and data, and is the best option for virtual server environments.”
Elms believes that it is vital for every business to have an up-to-date disaster recovery (DR) strategy and that this covers not only simple daily backups but also:
* Recovery Point Objective (RPO), which talks to the validity of restored data, from the time of the last backup;
* Recovery Time Objective (RTO) to advise how long it will take for the system to be fully operational again and this needs to include planning for hardware and other systems being available to load the backed up data;
* Clarity on how often backups are tested to ensure that recovery is possible; and
* Confirmation of who is managing the backups and notifications.
“There is nothing more catastrophic than losing all your business and personal data. Finding the best backup and recovery solution can mean the difference between starting from scratch, or merely restoring data,” concludes Elms.