Why does disaster recovery (DR) matter?
Disaster Recovery (DR) is often considered to be a ‘luxury’ add-on service for larger companies, but in reality, it is a fundamental part of every business’s IT strategy.
Our disaster recovery service helps your business prepare for the unexpected by continuing business operations in the event of a disaster. A disaster could be any event that could put your business at risk and could take your services offline, such as DDoS attacks, ransomware, network failures, accidental data deletion, or natural events affecting a data centre. DR is a critical service for customers who are running business-critical applications, databases and websites and cannot tolerate downtime.
The importance of a disaster recovery (DR) strategy
Having a DR strategy and plan in place helps to minimise risks and identifies any issues, dependencies or threats to the business. A DR plan consists of processes and procedures that are laid out specifically to be able to resume business as usual in the shortest possible time.
DR strategies should include an estimation of the time that it would take to recover from a range of situations or disasters, such as a full data centre disaster. There are two main concepts to consider with a DR strategy – Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
The two concepts provide the basis for business continuity, providing agreed time frames for resuming normal business operation in the event of a disaster.
The role of RPO in protecting data
A Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the point in a server’s timeline which a business could return to after a disaster. An RPO indicates how much data loss customers could afford to lose, which is an important consideration when planning a DR strategy. With daily backups taken by a hosting provider, a standard RPO will always be 24 hours, but the RPO can be reduced if more frequent backups are taken.
At Hyve, we reduce the risk of data loss by using continuous replication, ensuring data is mirrored in real time. As a result, the volume of lost data during failover is kept to an absolute minimum.
The role of RTO in minimising downtime
A Recovery Time Objective (RTO) refers to the maximum amount of downtime that a customer could tolerate before causing any harm to their business or day-to-day operations. A network, application or system could be affected, and part of the DR strategy is to determine how much downtime would be acceptable for each service.
RTOs are determined by your business’s specific requirements, however with our servers, if there was a fault with the underlying hardware, the server would reboot to another physical host within 2 minutes, dramatically reducing downtime risk.
The true cost of downtime
The main function of DR is to minimise the cost of downtime for your business in the event of a disaster. If a critical site was down for an hour, how much money or reputational damage would it cost your business?
RPOs and RTOs help businesses to identify key parameters in their disaster recovery strategy and ensure that expectations are met in their own business as well as for their customers. Having a full disaster recovery strategy will also help your business meet contractual obligations and compliance requirements. Many businesses’ critical systems cannot tolerate any downtime and must meet SLAs for their customers, making these structures necessary as part of a business strategy.
Next steps
Building an effective DR strategy will start with understanding your systems and defining acceptable recovery targets. From there, clear processes, replication models, and failover paths are established to ensure continuity.
At Hyve, we work closely with your business to design, implement, and test disaster recovery solutions tailored to your operational needs. Our engineers manage the complexities, allowing your teams to focus on your business goals, not on maintaining the infrastructure.
If you would like to assess your current disaster recovery strategy, or create a new one, fill out our contact form for an initial consultation.