Disaster Recovery

It doesn’t matter the size of your business, if you lose your data it is a Disaster! Larger companies can invest in disaster recovery schemes, but it can be a huge hurdle for smaller companies to find the funds to finance such systems. Cloud hosting helps smaller companies to cope, by saving them the capital needed to pay for such schemes as well as time and allowing them to tap into the hosting provider’s expertise.

One of the advantages of Cloud hosting is that you should never lose your data. All your files are saved remotely in an offsite protected data centre where a frequent backup regime is implemented. Cloud hosting, with the great investment that data centres have made in security, is intrinsically less susceptible to disaster than in-house servers.

It feels like we have been hearing about how wonderful the Cloud is for ages, but it can really help when it comes to data recovery after a disaster such as theft or crashes.

A Disaster Recovery storage plan needs some thought and here are a few basic things to consider when planning such a system;

WHAT ARE YOUR DATA NEEDS?
Before you embark on this mission it is a good idea to establish what are your company’s data needs. Are you looking to use Cloud technology on-line with a disk to disk to cloud backup system? With this approach, you can first back your data to a disk then transmit it to the Cloud. Your first port of call if there is a disaster is to your backup disks, but if they are compromised you always have the Cloud reserves.

WHO IS GOING TO HOST YOUR CLOUD STORAGE?
When your disaster recovery requirements are established you need to decide who’s going to provide you with Cloud Hosting. Not all service providers offer the same facilities, you need to check that yours meets your prerequisites.

WHAT IS THIS GOING TO COST YOU?
When you have established your needs, and identified your provider the big issue is, what is all this going to cost? Every provider will have their own way of costing but the essential components of price would include;

• A subscription fee, usually monthly
• What storage capacity are you expecting to need?
• What amount of internet bandwidth will you be expecting to use?
• What number of virtual processors do you need (VM’s)?

YOU WILL NEED TO CALCULATE YOUR BANDWIDTH REQUIREMENTS
Calculating your Bandwidth requirements is imperative as:

• Many service providers invoice you a fee for bandwidth used
• Your Service Provider may limit your bandwidth usage per month and/or charge you further for exceeding these limits
• You need to ensure that you have enough bandwidth to carry out your backups at the same time as making sure you still have enough left to run your business