A Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) solution, as well as the associated technical and business plans, ensure that required (or all) business services can continue in the event of a critical service outage that exceeds a business defined limit. This outage may affect local infrastructure, or it may affect additional infrastructure or services that are business critical but hosted externally to the business. These external services may be covered by their own BCDR guarantees.
Essentially, Disaster Recovery is seen as a subset to Business Continuity which deals with many business wide concerns and plans for different types of unforeseen issues, whereas Disaster Recovery is a more focused look at how IT (and associated services like telephony) would continue in the event of a critical outage.
Business requirements for BCDR are the most important pieces of information to get right and should be done before any potential solution is considered. This is because a business with requirements for a same day Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and a 5-minute Recovery Point Objective (RPO), would require a very different (and generally more expensive) solution to a business that has requirements for a 5-day RTO and a one day RPO.
What are RTO and RPO?
The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the period of time following an incident within which a product, activity or service must be resumed, or resources must be recovered. For products, services and activities, the recovery time objective must be less than the time it would take for the adverse impacts that would arise as a result of not providing a product/service or performing an activity to become unacceptable. – ISO 22301
The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the point to which information used by an activity must be restored to enable the activity to operate on resumption. This can also be referred to as “maximum data loss”. – ISO 22301
Business requirements for both the return to operation time, as well as the return point all affect the technical requirements and the end solution, as these business requirements can have wide ranging consequences on the plan and the infrastructure used for recovery.
How does this affect my IT services?
As recovery objectives shorten, effort is usually put into providing high availability or ready to go substitute infrastructure for business services, as opposed to restoring services from a backup. As this involves either additional infrastructure sharing a load or standby infrastructure ready to step in, resources must be allocated to check and maintain this additional infrastructure.
For short recovery objectives it is also absolutely critical to place priorities around business services so that if multiple services are affected in the event of a disaster, work can be correctly prioritized to restore the business critical services first. This is instrumental in the formulation of a successful BCDR plan.
If either the recovery requirements are incorrect, or change, it is imperative that everyone concerned be notified immediately, as these objectives have a major effect on the solution and the technologies that provide it.
I think I need a BCD plan… What are my next steps?
Coretek have extensive experience in providing tailored BCDR solutions for almost any business requirements. Solution options are available leveraging either our CoretekCloud platform or a leading third party public cloud provider. Contact Coretek today on 0800 304 7444 or email us on enquiries@coretek.co.uk to find out more or to discuss your requirements.