The Plan
A small office utilizing basic cloud backup. In an effort to keep costs low they are protecting only their most critical data to the cloud. Critical data consists of documents and files that are created or modified on a daily basis. E-mail is being protected locally with PST files on each workstation. The data NOT protected consists of server operating system files, these were considered easily replaceable by simply re-installing the OS.
This is a sound disaster plan and MANY businesses operate in this fashion to balance protection with cost.
The Disaster
Two hard drives fail in a RAID 5 ARRAY causing a total data loss scenario on their Microsoft Windows Small Business Server.
The Recovery
It took four days to bring the entire office back on-line with additional consulting time to “work out the kinks”
The Moral
Determining the true cost of an outage and the time it takes to accomplish this fairly simple sounding recovery can be a challenge. It can take several hours to perform a basic installation of Microsoft Windows then install the necessary service packs and patches. In addition to that you will need to re-deploy the active directory configuration, email addresses, mail forwarding rules and network printer configurations. An organization can easily spend one to two business days rebuilding the network and preparing it for users to login after a disaster occurs. I may also take more time to re-create user profiles and custom configurations from scratch.
If there is no local IT staff then there may also be consulting costs incurred. Add to that the cost of having employees sitting idle while the recovery takes place and it becomes a very expensive proposition.
The Solution
Coincidentally another small office operating with a Business Continuity Solution in place experienced the exact same type of total hardware failure at about the same time as the aforementioned small office. Using echopath’s VDR solution the business was able to failover to a virtual machine in a matter of moments. Email functionality and data access was restored even before some users realized there was problem. No data was lost since CDP (Continuous Data Protection) was running. CDP allows data to be backed up in real time as it is being created.
The Business Continuity Solution also allows for failover to a second location such as a DR site or echopath’s data center. In this case it was not necessary since it was only a hardware failure and not a total loss of the office facility.
The Case for Business Continuity
By making a relatively small initial investment and utilizing the same model of recurring monthly cost for protecting data in the cloud the benefits are obvious.
With ZERO downtime, ZERO idle employees, ZERO data loss and ZERO additional consulting dollars a good Business Continuity Solution can save your business a lot of ZEROS.
For more information or to have one our specialists contact you to discuss protecting your business call us or drop us a line at: http://echopath.wpengine.com/c/about/