• Business Continuity, DR and Backup
  • Business Continuity Readiness Assessment
  • Backup
  • Virtual Workspace Recovery
  • Data Recovery

Business Continuity, DR and Backup

Over the last few years organisations have recognised that virtualisation technologies enable the creation of cost effective, simplified and highly compliant business continuity and recovery solutions.
In fact studies and our experience has shown that the majority of organisations use business continuity as the strategic entry point into virtualisation, allowing them to overcome the evident challenges faced with delivering a robust and cost effective DR or business continuity solution. The three core area’s that are driving the need to integrate virtualisation technologies into business continuity can be broken down as:

Cost

• Substantial Capital and Operational IT expense
• Budgets allocated for DR often allow IT to protect selected systems and services
• DR Budgets are often deferred by the business to other projects
• No common ability to cross charge systems or services protected to the business

Risk

• Business Continuity Plan and DR run book are out of date from the outset
• Tape based back up – often leaving untested recovery process
• Recovery processes differ depending on system type e.g. SQL, Exchange, Web
• Backup window shrinking and data storage requirements multiplying
• DR site infrastructure = twice the management & training overhead
• Data centre systems recovered – what about user application access?

Service

• Increasing need for zero RPO for all systems (no data loss)
• RTO in the minute’s or hours for total site loss
• High availability of all local systems in the datacentre

Virtual Age has delivered many different DR and business projects and several of our senior consulting staff joined us from senior end user IT roles where they held responsibility for managing DR and were early adopters of products such as VMware ESX to protect business critical systems.
The solutions we deploy provide tangible benefit to both the business and IT including:

• Create service classed and a common language between IT and the business
• Reduce the Capital & Operational cost of delivery DR by up to 60%
• De-risk the recovery process by training IT staff to use the same recovery process for any system type
• Automate the recovery and guarantee the RTO and RPO with pre defined service classes
• Take ownership of capital assets as opposed to pure DR operational expenditure (e.g. annual server ship in contract)
• Investments made in virtualised DR infrastructure provide IT with a test and development platform at no additional cost.
• Non disruptive testing of DR and failover during business hours via products such as VMware Site Recovery Manager with automatic generation of auditable test reports
• Automated provisioning of DR resources in the event of invocation
• Backup and Recover individual files, systems or groups of systems in agreed SLA’s with business or department

To understand the feature rich solutions we are deploying or to view a live demonstration of some of the core products we deploy such as NetApp software tools and VMware Site Recovery Manager please click here to contact us.