Managed Backup/Disaster Recovery
Managed Services - Disaster Recovery/Backup
Disasters Happen, Let Us Manage the Recovery
Disasters happen, regardless of how flashy, new, or well-maintained your equipment is. Regardless of all the talent, training, and cost. They just happen.
Knowing this, minimizing the negative and liability laden effects come down to the measures you’ve taken before that time. Period. In our experience, true disaster preparation requires an understanding of the policies, tools, and procedures to enable the smooth recovery and continuation of your business, and to have best-in-class solutions at the ready. We understand backup and disaster recovery services.
Our expertise comes in exact backups, strong safeguards and proven processes that protect your irreplaceable, proprietary data. Our Backup and Disaster Recovery solution combines the entire process into a single service that incorporates planning, storage, design, testing, monitoring, restoration assistance, failover, reporting and much, much more. If you only get one shot at being ready for this, isn’t it best to ensure that everything which could be done, has been done?
Remember One Thing... All MSPs are NOT Created Equally.
Backup and Disaster Recovery Guidelines
To reach this ideal state of readiness, we commonly recommend our clients follow these backup and disaster recovery guidelines, which we’ve put together over decades of network experience:
- Create a backup and disaster recovery plan: an effective strategy is a foundation for a full and speedy resumption of normal operations.
- Protecting: implement layers of infrastructure protection and controls to strengthen the resiliency and security posture through advanced tools, policies, and guidelines.
- Monitor environments: intelligently manage your data through a single interface to ensure data availability and business continuity across your on-premises and cloud environments.
- Restore your data: perform fast restores with an intact and secure data copy to quickly resume normal business operations and reduce the impact.
- Test your plan: frequently test to verify you can meet your defined SLAs for high-priority data and applications.
In today’s environment, even a single minute of downtime can cripple your business. From lost customers to regulatory fines to damaged brand value, interrupted service and data breaches can have broad, negative impacts on a business—and if critical applications, processes, and systems are not highly available and resilient, the failure is catastrophic.
According to Gartner, the average cost of a minute of network downtime is $5,600.
That’s $336,000 per hour of downtime. Minimizing the time spent between identifying a disaster
and recovering your operations can save your organization from failure.
Backup and Disaster Recovery Services – How it Works
Modern IT leaders like In The Cloud Tech tackles this problem by moving away from traditional approaches and rebuilding disaster recovery strategies to take advantage of new, proven technology. A Disaster Recovery plan can take many forms and the development of the right plan for unique business needs requires starting at the beginning.
Our Disaster Recovery Services team delivers customized disaster preparedness planning, real-time disaster response coordination, and post-loss insurance and even training, support, and guidance to help your organization successfully navigate each phase of the recovery process. These solutions help your organization successfully recover from all disasters like hackers, Ransomware, viruses and even things like fires, floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes.
In this scenario, the “Why” part isn’t really all that important. It all ends in the same place, where your data is rendered unusable and even potentially dangerous and can no longer be trusted. Through risk preparedness, emergency response, and disaster recovery, we help commercial private sector entities and public not-for-profit entities during your greatest times of need.
To reach this scenario, we like to employee what’s called a “Cyber Resiliency Assessment,” as Cyber-attacks like ransomware are incredibly sophisticated and the reality is that no organization is immune. This assessment helps you understand where your cyber risks and vulnerabilities are now and allows you to receive actionable recommendations and to:
- Assess current cyber preparedness and current ability to detect, respond and recover from a ransomware or other cyber-attack.
- Measure exposures and vulnerabilities and gain best practices and tailored recommendations to address gaps and reduce cyber risks.
- Receive individual actionable recommendations and peer comparison in a comprehensive appraisal of preparedness.
Advantages of Managed Backup and Disaster Recovery Services
Disaster recovery as a managed service makes a lot of sense for Small to Medium Businesses (SMBs), including:
- Eliminates the need to establish and equip a secondary data center for Disaster Recovery purposes.
- Doesn’t require exact duplication of storage hardware between the primary data center and the Disaster Recovery site.
- Provides best-in-class solutions for SMBs that lack the necessary expertise to create an effective disaster recovery plan in-house.
- Frees in-house IT staff to focus on other systems, applications, and projects.
Our solutions automate specific functions, such as updating procedures, providing real-time analytics on the status of the program and Disaster Recovery plan exercising. Organizations with minimal or no Disaster Recovery activities can use these resources to configure a suitable and cost-effective program in a relatively short amount of time. Our recovery services include additional activities such as monitoring critical infrastructure elements, backing up data and applications and even monitoring of production environments.
Creating a Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan
The first step is creating a Disaster Recovery Plan that’s a perfect, ideal, logical, and sustainable fit for your organization. We will conduct stakeholder workshops and interviews to better understand your organization’s requirements, application and infrastructure inventory, and existing information about any Backup and Disaster Recovery services you currently have in place. We then design a state-of-the-art and cost-effective Disaster Recovery solution, which includes an investment analysis, implementation roadmap, and a cumulative Disaster Recovery Design report. From here, we more towards implementing your Disaster Recovery Plan.
This plan establishes clear steps for organizations to restore acceptable operating conditions as quickly as possible. The engagement begins with an assessment of your existing disaster recovery documentation (if any), as well as targeted workshops and interviews with key stakeholders. In The Cloud Tech also analyzes your current testing procedures. The final deliverable includes step-by-step instructions to recover your key systems and operating procedures, along with guidance on testing and contingency plans.
Create the Plan
Provide step-by-step disaster recovery instructions for both technical staff and end users.
Satisfy all Stakeholders
Satisfy all of the policies, strategies, and requirements of your existing business continuity plan.
Implement Procedures/Standards
Implement testing procedures and standards, so you know your disaster recovery plan will work when it’s needed.
What is our Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan Process?
Our Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan is a set of documents with step-by-step instructions to recover key systems and restore them to acceptable, then full-service levels. The plan includes steps to recover any associated infrastructure, as well as recommendations to continually test the plan, ensuring your organization’s readiness at any time. Our Disaster Recovery Services are a great fit for organizations of any size that are required (either legally or by contracts) to maintain a minimum level of downtime. While enterprise companies have the most work to do to create a disaster recovery plan, mid-market and small companies also benefit from knowing their business is safe in the event of a crisis.
This is achieved in three steps:
- Disaster Plan Discovery – We identify key executives as well as IT and business stakeholders in your organization, then schedules stakeholder workshops and one-on-one interviews to learn more about your existing disaster recovery plans, including testing, changes since development, and goals. We also collect an inventory of your organization’s current production systems and target recovery systems, along with any existing disaster recovery documentation.
- Disaster Plan Analysis – We analyze all existing documentation and processes, in addition to findings from the workshops and interviews, to discover gaps between your current disaster recovery plan and your business continuity plan. We will also examine all testing procedures to see if they still meet the standards set forth in your business continuity plan. Based on this analysis, Connection will either update your existing disaster recovery and testing plan or create an entirely new plan.
- Disaster Plan Reporting – We produce a final disaster recovery design report with specific guidance or recommendations for contingency plans for each critical system, restoration (for bringing critical systems back to normal production levels), and testing. Optionally, we can also present the plan to your executives and/or stakeholders.
eBook: Predicting Unified Collaboration and Communication as an MSP
Throughout the pandemic era of 2020, communication and collaboration applications saw unparalleled growth as companies rushed to provide for remote workers. This unified communications eBook was developed to address these very issues and includes hybrid workplace changes. As these developmental stages took place, the timing coincided with the already growing acceptance and use of the cloud. Notions of Unified Communications (UC), especially VoIP and traditional telephony, began to be examined regarding efficiency, usefulness, and providing the same user experience across multiple channels.
We examine this developing trend of porting communications and user functions to the cloud and ask will it as a service become the standard for years to come? Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS – Download here) is picking up speed and seeing great returns on investment, especially when combined with support and other service stack offerings. This eBook begins by examining the current state of technology for remote/hybrid workers.
