A lot of our IT strategy meetings start with the hypothetical Godzilla scenario, which is as follows….
Godzilla attacks. For some unknown but very plausible reason he’s decided to only attack your server room. After he’s done eating your server racks he hops on his segway and heads back to the beach.
Assuming that your staff aren’t overly traumatised by the orderal, how long would it take you to get back to some semblance of productivity?
I would hope you have a backup in place for all of your critical systems, as that’s part of the ASD Essential 8. If you do, that’s great! But you probably don’t have a spare server rack sitting around to restore to, right? We could be looking at days or weeks for new equipment to arrive before we even start restoring the server data.
In a Disaster Recovery Plan this is referred to as a Recovery Time Objective target (or RTO). Ideally you want to make that as small as possible so you don’t have staff waiting around before they can get back to work.
Side note: If you would like to calculate how much this downtime might cost in terms of lost productivity you might want to take a look at our Productivity Cost Calculator located on our Support Tools page. Unfortunately we can’t put a dollar figure on the reputational damage you might face from your customers but there is a good chance that if your business can’t satisfy their requests they may look elsewhere.
The quickest path to recovery
The easiest way to reduce your RTO is to utilise a cloud based backup service with Disaster Recovery built in. It’s like having a spare server on standby which lives in a data centre off-site, which can spin up a version of your server on the cloud until your replacement hardware arrives. Restoring a cloud server from a snapshot can take as little as a few minutes.
A simple comparison would be car insurance. If you are in an accident or have car troubles many insurance providers have an option to give you a loaner car while yours is off the road. It lets you do your thing while your car is out of action. When your car is ready you give the car back and get back into your car. Disaster Recovery is similar but instead of cars we’re talking about servers.
This fella’s laptop is really important too
Sometimes no matter how many times you ask, people with business critical jobs don’t seem to get the message that their important data needs to be backed up or saved to the company SharePoint or OneDrive. Maybe some users have a specific app that only works from their desktop, it’s fragile and unsupported but it’s critical to the business. This happens from time to time with custom-built programs which were developed by some previous company contact who’s name was lost to the wind years ago, but that program is used every day and there’s no replacing it.
This backup and DR strategy works on desktops and laptops too! There are a handful of reliable options for cloud based backup for endpoints with the same Disaster Recovery functions which are commonly applied to servers. For instance, if I leave my laptop at an airport during the check-in process (again) and there’s a bunch of things installed on it which would be a huge hassle to reconfigure I can just work off any spare device, connect to a cloud version of my laptop until I get a replacement to restore to. Since I follow the Essential 8 practice of encrypting devices at rest the only real downside is replacement hardware costs and the embarassment that I left a laptop on the scanner tray while putting my shoes and belt back on.
What can I do about it?
Speak to us, of course! We can help you come up with a Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity Plans which suit your needs and addresses your areas of risk.