Investing in something that may happen might seem like a luxury for larger organizations to have. Especially when you have to consider the cost of additional hardware, licenses, off-site data centre and support, how much should we invest when it comes to disaster recovery?
How likely will I be affected?
While Singapore is lucky to be geographically located in a region that is unlikely to experience natural disasters such as typhoons, floods, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes. We have seen plenty of disasters in many other forms. In fact, for businesses in regions that are less fortunate, most “IT Disasters” are caused by operational failures rather than natural disasters.
What would an “IT Disaster” cost me?
How much an “IT Disaster” affects a business tie to the organization’s dependence on IT to operate. The true cost of downtime consists of not just cost to recover and replace the equipment, employees losing their ability to do their job when they are disconnected, customers and prospects buying from a competitor after losing their patience, damage to reputation, and even penalties & fines for certain industries all need to be taken into consideration when trying to calculate the cost of downtime.
What’s the best option for me?
If your investment is going to be larger than your cost of downtime, it wouldn’t make any sense for you to do so. There are many ways for you to set up disaster recovery, with different providers offering different solutions at different prices, how should one determine what’s the best option for the organization?
Before deciding on the products, we should first understand our recovery objectives.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO): How much time are you prepared to be without your IT for?
Recovery Point Objective (RTO): How much data are you prepared to lose?
After identifying your recovery objectives, the next thing to do is to have a complete inventory of your business applications and categorize them into 3 groups.
Applications that you cannot do an hour without.
Applications that you need every day.
Applications that you can do without for at least a few days.
By identifying the importance of the applications, you can prioritize them in the event of a disaster and this list should be revisited at least once a year as there may be new applications added to your business and old applications that you don't use anymore. The more
The next thing to consider is your disaster recovery site. Certain organizations or regulatory bodies specify a min distance from the primary site to the disaster recovery site to avoid the spread of a disaster across the two sites.
Typically, organizations would choose between hosting their disaster recovery site or using a cloud provider to lower their capital expenditure. Of course, each has its pros and cons and choosing one that would meet your recovery objectives while not being a massive financial burden to the business is the key.
At Asiacloud, we provide Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to small and medium business catered to your business needs. If you are unsure of what would be the best disaster recovery strategy, we can help you identify your needs and offer the most cost-effective solution for your business.
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