Saturday, May 26, 2012

Managing Your Disaster Recovery


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By: Melinda Kingston

A managed service provider can make the difference between a smooth disaster recovery and catastrophic failure. Because so much time and energy can be spent on simply getting a business's IT program running, few consider the losses that can occur from an informational technology disaster. Using a virtual IT department as your managed service provider can help find a solution before disaster strikes.

What Is Disaster Recovery?

Professionals in the IT world have known the importance of disaster recovery for years. In the world of IT, how to minimize the negative effects due to an unplanned outage defines disaster recovery. Events that are classified as disasters include:

hacker attacks computer viruses electric power failures underground cable cuts or failures fire, flood, earthquake, and other natural disasters at a facility mistakes in system administration

Business continuity goes to the next level by planning how the critical business processes, including those utilizing IT systems, can be maintained in the event of a disaster.

Making a disaster recovery plan

Disasters and accidents happen, and it is impossible to plan for all potential disasters. Many companies with untested or poorly designed disaster plans will eventually discover that their network and data are unprotected. Disaster relief plans are hard to design and typically don't cover all real-world circumstances, or they are so cumbersome and unmanageable that they are of little value in an actual emergency. Even companies with well-designed disaster plans can look imprudent when they are faced with an unexpected disaster.

Planning and prevention are the best approach to disaster recovery. But, not all disasters are preventable or even anticipated. For those types of events an IT disaster recovery plan takes into account the need to:

detect the outages or other disaster effects as quickly as possible notify any affected parties so that they can take action isolate the affected systems so that damage cannot spread repair the critical affected systems so that operations can be resumed

Techniques of Sound Disaster Recovery

Redundancy is often relied upon in the recovery of data and systems. The reason for redundancy is so that secondary data or systems can go into service on short notice should the primary resources become unavailable. Backing up archive copies of data at time and can be restored later if needed. To avoid a single point failure replicating servers may be the chosen strategy. Mirroring ensures that data are available from other sources in near real time.

Managed Service Provider Can Help

Using a managed service provider can potentially help businesses deal with disaster recovery. Here are some of the best practices a managed service provider should be able to do:

Remote network monitoring helps prevent disasters before they happen

Increased redundancy through warm and hot sites are able to better protect information

Network security at all levels of operation is key to disaster prevention

Routine network support with upgrade serviced and configuration aid in emergency response

Regularly scheduled support and maintenance ensures that recovery is not only possible but seamless across all platforms

Computer repair service support for those times when hardware does fail or get damaged

Email Support and recovery so that internal and external communications are remain intact regardless of the disaster severity

Every disaster is different and companies need to be vigilant and current in their preparedness. If these best practices aren't happening, it's time to consider using a virtual IT department as your managed service provider.

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Author Resource:->??Ed Jillson is a professional Author from California who wrotes many Articles related to business and profession

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