From Zero to Hero: Eliminating customers’ data loss
What are their business needs? Is email critical? What about archived data? A good starting point is therefore classifying their existing types of data, which usually fall into three main types: static, business-vital and mission-critical. It then becomes easier to define what needs protecting and how to do it.
With different levels of protection available for different data categories, not all will become part of the true DR strategy although all data in a business is an asset and needs to be protected. Looking at the core business data will determine how you approach your customers’ DR strategies; more often than not a ‘one solution fits all’ will not be appropriate, and this is where your expertise will really show through.
Acceptable recovery speed (RTO) and level of data loss (RPO) are just two key criteria to be considered alongside the services and data that the customer will need first during a disaster. Core business services can be quickly restored using offsite services. Alternatively you could place the production systems offsite in a secure, managed datacentre, while the DR location is back at the company office. This way the manpower needed to implement the DR strategy is now available onsite and not in a remote datacentre with restricted access. If an offsite location is required the reseller can leverage the data classification to determine what needs to be replicated to the customer’s DR site.
Looking at data movement within a Disaster Recovery strategy, one of the more popular methods is virtualisation; it allows the deployment of many standby servers in a smaller footprint than a traditional physical solution, leading to much-appreciated hardware-based cost reductions, although the real benefits of virtualisation start when it’s deployed across multiple locations as the core systems available become easier to manage in terms of DR.
Most resellers planning a DR solution that spans multiple sites will inevitably have to deal with the replication of the changing data sets. Many products enable data replication but they do not always give the ability to catch issues around data corruption or logical data deletion. Proposing an ‘out of band’ solution to customers to replicate and recover the changing data sets will give greater flexibility during recovery.
Last but certainly not least, a sound Disaster Recovery strategy should include regular testing that the data is reaching the DR site, that it can be successfully retrieved and that it validates. Job done. You have now gone from zero (data loss) to hero (status).
