Business Continuity
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery NewDatum Consulting are at the forefront of designing and delivering disaster recovery solutions based on the latest virtualisation technologies. We can help you implement solutions that will afford you the level of protection previously only available to organisations with disaster recovery budgets in the hundreds of thousands of pounds. We can deploy solutions across your organisations sites or hosted solutions located in dedicated data centers. Business continuity planning (BCP) is a procedure put in place by an organisation to ensure that essential business processes continue following a disaster. A business continuity plan is wide ranging and takes into account the need for alternative facilities, communications and all resources required to keep the business operational. Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) is a subset of BCP and focuses specifically on the recovery of IT systems. The disaster recovery plan documents procedures IT staff will follow to re-establish business system functionality after an outage. Each business application must be audited, its recovery needs assessed and documented, and the importance of the application to the organization quantified to enable IT staff to prioritise the recovery process. As part of the audit each application and data source must be evaluated to determine both a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO). RPO is the amount of data that can be lost before it affects the organization, and RTO is the time it takes to recover and restart the server and application. These provide guidelines for how up to date data must be and how quickly it must be recovered. After determining RPO and RTO for each application it is time to evaluate the technologies that will meet the RPO and RTO requirements for each application.  The traditional three approaches to disaster recovery have been: Always Available configurations (RPO/RTO 0) which included expensive duplicate servers in different data centers and data replication using expensive storage arrays. Fast Recovery configurations (RPO/RTO 1-12 hours) which include standby hardware that has data replicated over an acceptable RPO interval and may be activated in the required RTO. Backup Recovery configurations (RPO/RTO > 12 hours) are simply recovering a server from the last available backup copy. The backup recovery option is by far the slowest for recovery and least efficient.
The above approaches meet all the requirements of a disaster recovery solution but options one and two have been prohibitively expensive for all but the largest of organisations to implement. Virtualisation server and storage technologies enable the deployment of “Always Available” and “Fast Recovery” solutions at prices SMB’s can justify. Where as previously these solutions cost in the hundreds of thousands of pounds they are now available at prices starting at less than ten thousand pounds. NewDatum Consulting are experts in deploying cost effective disaster recovery solutions based on virtualisation technologies and have successfully deployed such solutions for UK companies. The key virtualisation technologies employed in virtualised disaster recovery solutions are:
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