Most company’s conduct backups but fail to test if they can recover if a disaster strikes. The news is full of large and small companies suffering system outages for days or even weeks. These outages happen because Cloud backups restoring to on-site servers can be very slow and takes a long time to recover. So, this is where you need a disaster recovery plan, and careful testing makes your backups work for your business in the event of a disaster.

Here at Northstar, we can provide you with a disaster recovery plan that you can implement immediately and show you how to test that it works. We can design systems that are recoverable in 24 hours or less than 1 minute and fit with your budget whether you are a large organisation with servers on-site and in the Cloud or a small business with a few Laptops.

What is disaster recovery?

Disaster Recovery involves a set of policies, tools and procedures to enable the recovery or continuation of vital technology infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster. For example, this could be anything from component failure to cyber-attack. Furthermore, different incidents require a different approach.

How does it work?

First, we help you analyse what data we need to recover and how fast. We can then help control costs to match requirements. One helpful method for fast recovery is to restore a backup to a parallel system already standing by. It costs less than high availability systems that continually update one another, but they provide a fast recovery in a disaster.

We help you make a plan so managers and technicians can easily see what to do first and who to contact for help. The disaster recovery plan should follow a step by step process for different incidents and include locations to find critical data. Any problems with the disaster recovery plan can be fixed during regular testing, preventing them from occurring in a disaster. Disasters by nature are unpredictable, especially when a cyber attacker is at work. So the best designs are usually the best because they are easy to adapt to changing situations.

What about Cloud backups?

Cloud backups are very popular, but recovering them to your on-site server can often take too long in a disaster. In the meantime, your business is losing money because of the downtime. Conducting a cloud recovery to a cloud server can be much faster but takes careful planning and testing.

In summary, anyone can backup, but a successful, timely recovery requires focus. Northstar can help you make every penny you spend on protecting your business count.