Hurricane season began June 1st and will last until November 30. We have typically thought it was the southern states that had to worry about hurricanes and develop disaster recovery plans to ensure their business continuity. However, after Hurricane Sandy in 2013, the northeastern states have also come to realize that they are not immune. Experts are predicting that 2013 could be worse the than 2012 season. Is your business ready? Make sure you are with a good IT Disaster Recovery Solution.
Even if you are not on the east coast or in the southern states, other disasters can occur, from tornados and floods to man-made events and even as the result of user error. Every business, no matter where it is located needs to be prepared for unexpected system failures that can severely impact their business.
If you have an unexpected system failure, there is a high potential for lost data. Additionally, with computer systems down there can be lost productivity ranging from just minutes to hours or days.
You don’t have to be a bank or a hospital to have an IT disaster recovery plan, even the smallest businesses can be impacted significantly by a system failure and therefore, need to have a plan in place.
Technology has become such an integral part of most businesses today that having a backup and recovery solution to protect your systems, applications and data is essential. There are a range of options depending on your specific requirements. For example, a bank or hospital would need to have a backup and recovery solution that ensured real-time access to their systems, to ensure their operations won’t skip a beat, such as High Availability or HA. For a small business, such as a local jewelry shop, they might be able to get away with processing everything manually for a few hours and use backup to disk or tape for its recovery.
Once a solution is selected and implemented, it needs to be tested regularly to ensure it will operate correctly if a disaster does occur. With technology always changing, so too should the disaster recovery solutions in order to keep up with your existing environment. Check out some of the high availability and disaster recovery options for IBM Power Solutions.
Our next blog post will focus specifically on how to utilize VMware to optimize your IBM Network environment for disaster recovery.
