Disaster recovery and how it is fast becoming the norm for SME’s.
In the wake of the recent flooding in parts of the North East of England, Russell Henderson of SITS Group, a firm of cloud computing specialists, expands on disaster recovery and how it is no longer the exception, but is fast becoming the norm for SME’s.
“It will never happen to me” – this is a phrase which business are increasingly less likely to count on, particularly in light of the recent floods which hit the North East showing that the unexpected can happen; with wide spread disruption for businesses, commuters, charities and emergency services, all due to flooding in what should be a sunny June.
But disaster need not always strike. Cloud infrastructures provide businesses with cost-effective disaster recovery so they no longer need to double up on server hardware; this means that the option of having a disaster recovery strategy in place is now real for many more SME’s than ever before.
Furthermore, the process of recovering information from a cloud environment is simple compared to physical server recoveries, it genuinely takes minutes to recover systems, not hours or days. This allows businesses to test their disaster recovery processes quickly and cheaply to ensure the processes work as required should they ever be called upon.
This type of disaster recovery lends itself to all different scales of businesses, from a single server protecting four or five critical business servers, to a cloud solution offering protection for all business systems at costs far lower than was previously possible before virtualisation technology arrived.
Historically businesses invested in disaster recovery, some as a tick box exercise for insurance purposes, others truly deployed systems to recover the business should the worst happen; most of these businesses shared the same fear, the cost and disruption of testing was greater than the fear of not testing.
Today’s cloud systems allow businesses to be reassured that their investments in protecting themselves, their customers and their suppliers actually work.
Russell Henderson is a technical advisor at SITS Group, based as Northumberland Business Park, Cramlington. For more information visit www.sitesgroup.com.