Assuming the recovery position

Ian McKay talks about options for disaster recovery

Disasters do happen. It is therefore essential for organisations to have an effective disaster recovery strategy if they are to avoid losing valuable data, time and money.

Most customer businesses may be in a situation where IT systems are reliable and available for daily operations but unable to handle recovery needs. In the event of a disaster, restoring all systems onto new hardware can result in several days of downtime for users.

And many customers still do not know what their options are for their disaster recovery requirements.

If most of a customer's disaster recovery budget is allocated to protect the most critical applications, a large portion of the business-critical servers may be under-protected. And the risk of downtime will be high.

Any business-critical server essential to maintaining operations will require costly fault tolerance and clustering, while any business-supporting servers not essential to running operations may use ineffective restore-and-recover offerings.

Offerings should bridge the gap between performance-based disaster recovery, through infrastructure duplication and affordable disaster recovery, to data back-up.

Encourage customers to adopt an approach that ensures their workload can be moved between physical, virtual or cloud environments. This way, users may be able to restore critical workloads in just a few hours, regardless of hypervisor platform or server vendor.

In downtime, users can be redirected to the replicated workload in the virtual recovery environment, or the workload can be restored to the same or new hardware. Disaster recovery software should ideally provide businesses with the ability to move restored workloads quickly to wherever they are needed.

Ian McKay is EMEA channel director at NetIQ