Focis Information Systems .:. WHAT IS YOUR BACKUP/DR STRATEGY?

WHAT IS YOUR BACKUP/DR STRATEGY?

Backups and Disaster Recovery are possibly the most overlooked aspect of small business IT.

Traditionally, a backup strategy includes one person at the office given a few tapes or portable USB hard disks and tasked with rotating them every few days. Some may even take the disk off-site. But this introduces a series of problems including but not limited to: Is your off-site data encrypted? What would happen if this staff member's car was broken into and your backups stolen? What if this person is off sick and neglects to delegate this task to someone else in the organisation?

Further, does anyone actively perform test restores on the backup to ensure that if something were to happen to your system, you could recover safely?

Another aspect of backup most do not consider until it is too late is the RTO (Recovery Time Objective). This is a simple yet very important metric in selecting a backup strategy. Simply put, it says "How long will it be before my business can continue at full capacity again?" Businesses often struggle with the cost benefit equation also. They want the best system possible, but are forced into something less than ideal due to the cost.

Here at Focis, we've solved this problem creatively -- with Focis Hosted Desktop. In addition to backups taken 4 hours (or more frequently to suit our client requirements), we have redundancy at every step.

Our equipment racks are housed in two different datacentres in New Zealand. Each datacentre has 24x7 security monitoring, fire suppression, seismically bracing and has multiple internet connections. Each server has multiple redundant components. Even sub-systems such as hard disks and power supplies are redundant. Further to this we partner with recognised industry leading hardware suppliers who provide same-day turnaround on parts should anything go wrong.

A disaster could take out an entire datacentre and your staff can continue working. All this functionality is offered to you at a fraction of the in-house deployment cost by leveraging economies of scale.