by Abbie-Lee Hollister, on October 3, 2019
Disaster Recovery for virtualised environments are often overlooked, yet incredibly important component to securing your client’s applications and data.
Traditional businesses with a single data center must explore alternative methods for building robust disaster recovery options. And if you are operating in a highly virtualised environment, this can get very complicated, and very expensive.
So where do you begin in building your disaster recovery plan? Here are some items to consider in Building and Executing your DR Plan.
1. Treat It Like Your OwnManage your client’s infrastructure and applications like it was supporting your business. Most clients don’t understand the depth and breadth of which they are reliant on their application and data. You need to be the guardians of their data galaxy.
2. Inventory Your Current Infrastructure
The simple axiom here is to start at the beginning and make sure you know what you know, or more importantly, you discover that which you don’t know. There are many application dependencies that lay hidden until a true disaster strikes.
3. Understand Your Applications
Understand and document your applications and their dependencies. This understanding is crucial to building your Disaster Recovery plan. Not all applications need to be running during a crisis.
Knowing and ensuring critical application to the business are in your DR site will ensure the survivability of your client’s business and create cost savings for excluding applications that aren’t necessary in the event of a disaster.
4. Consider DRaaS
Consider Disaster Recovery as a Service instead of building a complete DR site. A DR site sits idle until needed costing you both CapEx and OpEx. Choosing the right DRaaS for your virtualized environment maximises your margins while reducing your operational overhead.
5. Test Your DR Site
Test your DR site on at minimum a quarterly basis. Don’t let a disaster highlight your oversights in disaster planning.
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