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Have Servers, will travel |
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Disaster Recovery System Audits and Testing Evaluation of Your Current System’s Cost of Downtime Determine the cost of your e-Commerce or
internal web site going offline for any length of time. This evaluation would
involve not only the direct costs of doing business (loss of productivity,
loss of revenue, additional cost to meet schedule or commitment, and cost of
repair), but also indirect costs based on damaged reputation in the
marketplace, or financial performance issues (cost of credit). Some
of these numbers can be extremely difficult to obtain, and, if the direct
costs are sufficient to justify the disaster recovery modifications to your
data center, then we will limit our research to your direct costs. Evaluation of Your Current Systems and Procedures Determine the reliability and redundancy that is
currently built into your existing data center and business applications.
Some of the areas we look at are: ·
Hardware redundancy (storage systems,
clustered systems, redundant network protocols, load balancing systems, etc.) ·
Short-term disaster recovery that may
already be in place (UPS power systems, redundant networks, outage
notification to your IT department, etc.) ·
Data and system backup procedures for
completeness and both their physical and logical security ·
Long-term disaster recovery that may
already be in place (off-site facility, backup and restore procedures,
connectivity to the primary systems, fail over mechanisms, etc.) Testing Your Current Disaster Recovery Systems and
Procedures Evaluate your procedures and systems in a
simulated disaster to insure that your procedures are complete and the
automated fail over mechanisms are fully functional and configured properly. Disaster Recovery Planning Reality Test will help your IT organization
develop a disaster recovery plan, and the associated procedures, that will
help assure you of the ability to limit your exposure to disasters and the
resulting business losses. Companies should periodically assess the
importance and criticality of their systems and data, and develop a
contingency plan appropriate to their application. Summary There are numerous disaster scenarios that can
disrupt your business. Reality Test can
support your internal efforts to mitigate the risk, or can take more of an
out-sourced management role to free up your internal resources. Not all the parts of your data center
necessarily need to be protected to the same reliability level. Prioritizing
the business-critical applications could result in significant saving to your
company’s disaster recovery efforts. The greatest risk is to simply assume that your
systems are safe or that “it can’t happen to me.” Insurance, while it always
appears expensive when you don’t need it, becomes invaluable when you do. |
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Reality Test® |