Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery is an essential part of an overall business continuity plan and involves the restoration of operations critical to the resumption of business after a natural or human-induced disaster.

Objectives and considerations of ICT continuity plans include, but are not limited to reducing the impact of a disaster or major failure and reducing your organisation’s vulnerability by analysing and mitigating risks.

The aim of OPC’s ITIL-based, ICT Business Continuity Service is to ensure your organisation’s required IT technical and services facilities can be recovered up to an agreed point in time (Recovery Point Objective or RPO). This includes all policies, guidelines, standards and procedures that your business has, made into an organised and up to date system that is easily accessed and understood.

OPC IT can assist with the design, documentation, implementation and management of an ICT business continuity plan for any organisation by incorporating various methodologies such as:

• Data security assessments
• Disaster recovery architecture assessments
• Disaster recovery reporting services
• Offsite backup and media storage

Data security assessments

For any successful Disaster Recovery Plan it is vital that a full understanding of an organisation’s specific data requirements and potential vulnerabilities be assessed. A thorough assessment will identify the gaps in organisational controls, their policies and processes. It will raise awareness with key stakeholders and ensure that your system meets with regulatory compliance.

Disaster Recovery

OPC understands the need for all businesses to have reliable data protection and have the ability to recover entire systems, even from bare-metal in minutes rather than hours.

OPC’s SMB Disaster Recovery solution utilises real-time data snap-shots (backups) every 15 minutes and saves the data to Network Attached Storage (NAS). OPC can snapshot whole servers (including applications like Microsoft Exchange) and other key organisational desktops such as Accounts and POS machines.

By implementing StorageCraft’s ShadowProtect software, our turnkey solution is able to fully protect all physical or virtual servers and desktops in your environment. The software not only eliminates the cost and complexity of providing traditional backup software, but also provides recovery and disaster recovery with a single, integrated solution. Snap-shots are directed to a NAS storage device which is configured with enough internal disk capacity to maintain months of data.

Within the recovery environment, we allow you to not only restore systems, but also back them up. This is useful in a number of scenarios:

• If the system is unable to boot, StorageCraft allows you to back that system up before a destructive restore could destroy valuable data.
• ExactState backups, which are backups of volumes that are offline, can be taken when the best possible backup or cold backup is required.
• Through ShadowProtect’s remote management and remote control capabilities included as part of the StorageCraft Recovery CD, you can manage ShadowProtect recovery of files, folders or a bare-metal system recovery remotely.

Disaster recovery architecture assessments

OPC will assess your physical IT setup and suggest ways to create a safe environment for business data. These may include:

• Off-site backup media storage
• Off-site replication of data and/or workloads
• Outsourced standby-by sites and systems
• Preventative measures such as:
  • Local mirrors of systems and/or data and use of disk protection technology such as RAID and predictive fault analysis
  • Surge protection and electrical filtering systems incorporating uninterruptable power supplies to minimise the effect of power surges and power failure on delicate electronic equipment
  • Best of breed software based encryption, anti-virus and anti-malware and disk imaging products

Disaster recovery reporting services

A complete and comprehensive ICT disaster recovery plan is a must for any business or organisation looking for the agility required to continue normal business operations through extenuating circumstances. For many, either Government regulations or financial regulations demand the development and continual testing of disaster recover processes and operations. OPC can assist any organisation with the auditing and documenting of existing systems and techniques, propose improvements where possible, as well as providing the necessary skills and infrastructure to test any procedures put in place, thereby meeting any compliance or auditing requirements.

Offsite backup and media storage

OPC can provide your organisation with off-site storage of your valuable tape media giving you peace of mind that a copy of all your information is secure and available to restore in the event of a serious computer malfunction, a malicious attack, fire or theft.

OPC can provide:

• Weekly collection and exchange of your back up media
• Secure transit satchels to ensure confidentiality
• Storage in secure off site locations, protected by back to base alarm monitoring
• Availability within 2 hour should the need arise
• Fixed price per month

To find out more about how OPC IT can help protect your organisation, please contact us.