The Importance of Disaster Recovery Plans
The recent spate of natural disasters and extreme weather has heightened awareness of the importance of having sufficient disaster planning in place for your department.
IT systems and their continued availability are essential to the smooth running of all government departments and agencies. Any interruption to these critical systems can effectively halt the ability of a department to deliver critical citizen services.
The Challenges Departments Face in the Event of a Disaster
Departments of all sizes are exposed to risk from unplanned outages. Vital services need to be delivered ‘non-stop’ to ensure the smooth running of government.
Interruptions due to unexpected system failures, software corruption, windows of maintenance, instances of human error, outside threats or disasters, all have the potential to undermine internal confidence that IT can deliver. Additional risks include the potential of embarrassment to the agency.
IT staff are already over-stretched and under-resourced. In our experience, we find that business as usual tasks and projects take precedence over mundane but equally vital components such as Disaster Recovery and Data Protection.
Why not just use Backups?
Backup is the first critical step towards data preservation and restoration. However, it should not be relied on as a foolproof solution for disaster recovery.
Under normal circumstances, your backup is protecting your data. However, what happens if you lost access to your production environment due to hardware failure, human error or some other disaster (for example a natural disaster)? Would your agency end up in front of Senate Estimates? These risks make Disaster Recovery planning a necessity, not a ‘nice to have’. Through a single event, you run the risk of putting your agency on the front page of every national newspaper.
To truly protect your data, you need a secure secondary stage location and a fully tested, automated way to initiate business resumption. This means dedicating a recovery environment solely for this purpose.
Delivering Disaster Recovery Quickly and Easily
Planning, designing and building Disaster Recover solutions can be both complex and time consuming. As previously mentioned, we see IT staff over-stretched and unable to dedicate the necessary time to implement fundamental Disaster Recovery capability.
To deliver this vital service, many agencies are now looking to secure Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) options. DRaaS is a subscription based, fully managed outcome that enables critical services to be replicated from virtual or physical environments to a secure, highly available cloud infrastructure.
Infront has over a decade of Disaster Recovery expertise. We go beyond simple backup to ensure all key workloads are protected – and your business continuity plans are tuned to your specific business priorities and compliance needs. Start the conversation about your Disaster Recovery requirements today.