Disaster recovery: Serious protection for your business

Amy Gregory //June 2, 2014//

Disaster recovery: Serious protection for your business

Amy Gregory //June 2, 2014//

You protect what you value. You have insurance on your car, your home, and your health, which ensures that you will be taken care of in the event of an accident or natural disaster. Insurance gives you peace of mind that you and your assets will be protected. In fact, the idea of no insurance sounds like a risk, a very dangerous risk. Do you have the same peace of mind when it comes to your businesses data and applications?

With so much depending on technology, it is crucial for businesses to have a disaster recovery plan that keeps your data and resources protected. From storms and floods to employee errors and hardware malfunctions, a disaster could happen anytime, anywhere. Unplanned downtime is more than just a temporary loss of access to data or loss of information, it can also lead to a serious breach of security, cost millions in lost revenue, and even mean the end of business. In fact, studies show that when businesses experience a disaster:

  • 40 percent of all companies will go out of business if they cannot gain access to their data within 24 hours.
  • 43 percent of companies never reopen and 29 percent close within two years. 
  • 93 percent of businesses who lost their data center for 10 days went bankrupt within one year.

Every business should have a disaster recovery plan, and it should be tailored to the specific needs of your company. There are three main categories each disaster recovery plan should include:

  1. A guarantee you can resume business as quickly as possible
  2. Protection  from loss of access and loss of information in the event of natural disasters, such as fires, floods and storms, and man-made errors or malfunctions with the hardware or software.
  3. Protection  if your company experiences an unexpected loss of personnel.

After a disaster strikes, there are two specific time periods that should be addressed in your recovery plan: limited operations and makeshift operations. Limited operations are the immediate response and typically run for approximately one week. Disorganized at first as products and services are prioritized within the company, the limited operations time span then becomes the makeshift operations period that can last for several months until all operations are restored.

If you take your business seriously, it’s critical to take disaster recovery serious, too. OneNeck® IT Solutions delivers tailored disaster recovery plans designed to protect every aspect of your business. The OneNeck solution:

  • Is specific to one or many of your applications or a comprehensive data center solution.
  • Guarantees availability to rebuild and resume operations in minutes.
  • Offers cost flexibility with cloud-based and dedicated options.

It is important to take all precautionary measures to avoid a disaster and mitigate any negative  effects. You can install fireproof safes, back up your data and provide regular employee trainings with hardware and software updates. You should also run regular tests of your infrastructure to guarantee the disaster recovery plan can be activated immediately. However, the first step in any disaster recovery plan is that you have one. As a trusted provider of IT solutions with unmatched expertise and experience, you can count on OneNeck’s comprehensive suite of end-to-end disaster recovery solutions to take care of it all for you.

Contact OneNeck IT Solutions today for more information about disaster recovery. Let our team help you develop a plan to streamline recovery and business continuity in the event of a disaster. From upfront work, identifying highest priority data and assembling a recovery plan, OneNeck IT Solutions can take care of it all for you. A disaster can strike anytime, anywhere, but with OneNeck on your side, you’re always one step ahead.

With OneNeck, soon, your business will also have access to our newest Tier 3 data center in metro Denver. In mid-May, we announced plans to build our first data center in the state of Colorado. Once open, in early 2015, it will be a local resource to store your most critical IT infrastructure. It will also be connected to our data centers in the Midwest offering redundancy and uptime guarantees, should disaster strike locally.

The data center will be built to support common compliance requirements such as SSAE 16, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA among others. It will also include many state-of-the-industry features, such as:

  • Three factor security authentication, including iris scanners for personnel identification
  • Up to 16” thick steel-reinforced concrete walls, roof and floors
  • Ultra-quick responding VESDA (Very Early Smoke Detection Apparatus) fire detection system
  • Tier 4 electrical system with multiple levels of redundancy and backup
  • Energy saving cooling design with a projected PUE of 1.2 or less
  • Efficient use of space with a 5kW per cabinet average power density (the normal Colorado home uses about 1 kW), with maximums at 4 times that, or 20kW

We also plan to deploy ReliaCloud™ in the new data center to provide businesses with a local cloud solution, too. ReliaCloud is an enterprise-class IT Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution specifically designed for resource intensive applications and databases that necessitate a secure and compliant operational framework. It’s built with industry-leading products and capabilities from Cisco, EMC, and VMware.