You’ve built your business. It started as an idea, then it grew. Somewhere along the way, you grew as well. You bought that fancy ERP system, you built accounts, analyzed revenue, tracked expenses and optimized your processes. You’ve even bought those really expensive servers to run it all.
But if you’re honest, did you really give the same amount of attention to your “what if” plans? I mean, it probably was a “what if” that inspired you to start your business. It was most likely a “what if” that grew your business and optimized it.
But “what if your business immediately stopped”, probably didn’t make the list when planning. Yes, we are talking about a business. But it’s kind of more than that, isn’t it? We’re talking about people, payroll, families, commitments, products and reputation. It’s kind of a big deal.
At MCA, we focus on the things that matter, so you can focus on the things that matter. This means asking the “what ifs” to avoid the “what nows?”.
Our approach to disaster recovery and business continuity
There is a big difference between disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC)—the difference being big in mindset, process and money. So understand that disaster recovery is the action plan to recover critical systems. Business continuity is the execution of the preventative plan to keep all aspects of your business running despite an interruption.
Understanding the cost of downtime
To effectively plan, we need to know what is at stake.
- Develop your RPO and RTO – Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the point in time which you recover to. For example, if you’ve backed up a file 30 minutes ago, and made a bunch of changes, and lost the file in the middle of the changes, your RPO would be 30 minutes, because that is the most recent version of the file in existence. Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the amount of time it takes to restore operations based on your RPO. If using the previous example, the RTO of 30 minutes would mean that a restoration of a 30 minute RPO would make the file 60 minutes old. This is because it took 30 minutes to restore a file that was 30 minutes old.
- Implement production solutions with the DR vs. BC, the cost of downtime, and your RPO & RTO in mind. Our goal is to implement all solutions with resiliency in mind. If and where possible, implement technology solutions that can withstand RPO failures and can recover within the RTO.
- Implement a Backup and Recovery solution to recover from catastrophic disaster, user neglect and data corruption. Stuff is going to happen. We still need to recover, and fast. Corruption, deleted files and crashed systems must still be recoverable within the RTO and RPO window.
- Evaluate. Repeat. This process constantly evolves based on your business and technology needs.
You may not be able to stop unexpected emergencies on your own, but you can make sure your data is always protected. That’s the assurance data backup gives you.
Working with our disaster recovery & business continuity experts will be essential in the event of catastrophic data loss. When you know your data is safe and secure, you’re free to focus on the things that really matter to you—at work and at home. Now that’s peace of mind.
Contact us today to learn more about our solutions for data backup and recovery.
