Having a robust disaster recovery plan increases the chances that your business can survive a major loss of infrastructure and services. It may be that your business must be able to continue to run some IT services if disaster strikes. Having IT service continuity measures in place then becomes essential.
Disaster recovery is the ability to get your business up and running after something terrible has happened. This could be a switch or server failure rendering the network unusable until the part was replaced.
Backups are not disaster recovery and a full system recovery in a backup solution would take a lot longer than in a disaster recovery setup. With disaster recovery servers are replicated onto duplicate (or similar) hardware and are kept “ready to go” for when required. Disaster recovery solutions should include redundancy for switches, internet connectivity and other key network infrastructure components.
IT service continuity supports your Business Continuity Plan, giving you the ability to keep your business up and running while something terrible is happening.
IT service continuity can be achieved by doubling up of everything onsite with automatic failover in the event of a catastrophic failure. At the extreme end this could be an entire office set up at a separate location with all data constantly replicated to it and kept primed, ready to go at a moment’s notice.