At Mindsight, we consult businesses of all sizes on their disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity strategy. When considering pursuing your own disaster recovery strategy, it’s important to keep a few things in mind.
Disaster recovery is not about purchasing any one product over another. It’s about developing a strategy, and strategies need to take into account a range of factors and variables unique to the situation at hand. There’s no single disaster recovery solution that will be the best fit for everyone all the time. Therefore, the process is less about solutions and features and more about you and your environment.
The second aspect to keep in mind is about how to develop your strategy. While, every DR strategy will be unique to the business, the best plan focuses on your “needs” over wants. It is almost always in the company’s best interest to keep their strategy as lean as possible.
Ferrari’s and Civics
When discussing DR with our clients, there is a natural inclination for them to want the best of best—to spare no expense. That’s good. The willingness to do what it takes to protect your IT environment is the right mindset to have when developing your DR strategy. However, the best of the best isn’t necessary for most environments.
An idealized DR strategy might look like this:
Determine Critical Apps: Email, Voice, eCommerce, ERP, File/Print, Sharepoint, Everything!
Define Tolerance for Outages: All applications must be back online in less than 15 minutes.
This strategy is entirely possible to build and enact. We can set up an exact clone of the client environment in the cloud. If disaster strikes, all the client needs to do is flip a switch and everything is back online. If these are the standards set by the client, the end result is going to be extremely expensive. It would be the equivalent of buying a Ferrari just to drive it around the neighborhood.
Instead, we would rather steer you towards something a bit more modest. We could offer you something more like a Civic—less expensive, less flashy, but the car will be just as reliable and still get you where you need to go.
The Civic might look something like this:
Determine Critical Apps: Email, eCommerce, Voice
Define Tolerance for Outages: Voice
Take a Hard Look at Your Business
In our consultations, we need to ask some hard questions. What does your business need to survive? If you lost your ability to send emails right now, how long could you last before it causes serious damage to your business and year-end profits? We then ask a similar question for every aspect of the IT environment. The more specific the answers, the better. If we can pinpoint the importance of every application, we can fine tune the solution to maintain overall effectiveness and maximize efficiency.
Most businesses won’t need every application back online in fifteen minutes, so why overpay for your disaster recovery solution? With Mindsight, we can help you design and implement a strategy that is as effective as the disaster recovery Ferrari but far less expensive.