As more and more enterprises, their clients and end-users classify applications as “mission-critical”, the financial risks associated with system downtime continue to escalate. In May 2013, the Aberdeen Group performed a comprehensive survey and found that the average cost per hour of downtime was more than $163,000 US dollars*. With profit margins and brand reputations on the line, small businesses and large enterprises alike must recognize the importance of ensuring a Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity plan for all critical applications.
Before deciding how to implement your disaster recovery or business continuity plan, you should first determine what systems or applications require high availability. We highly recommend creating a comprehensive list of systems and categorizing each accordingly. You should then determine what level of availability each category deserves, because the higher the availability, the higher the cost. For example, public facing websites might have a higher priority than email servers, or a CRM. Consider all systems carefully.
Components of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity solutions
There are many components to every DR/BC implementation, and of course to every successful high availability solution. You must have redundant infrastructure in an alternate location such as servers, storage and network infrastructure, you must replicate data in anticipation of an outage to ensure synchronization, and when disaster strikes, you must be prepared to redirect traffic from the primary site to the alternate site seamlessly for your users. A true disaster recovery or business continuity solution requires implementation on various levels. Total Uptime helps complete the picture with solutions that can redirect and reroute traffic.
