DRS Overview

IT has become the backbone of organizations around the world today. It is an integral part of the corporate operations at every level. In simple terms, we can safely say that businesses nowadays run on IT. Technology finds itself firmly rooted in every corner of an organization. As a result, the need to plan for potential disruptions to technology services has increased exponentially. It is a well known fact that the World Trade Center bombing in Manhattan in 1993 resulted in total failure of 150 out of 350 businesses operating out of the Trade Center-that is a whopping 42% failure rate. A collapse of such magnitude happened because these organizations didn’t plan to overcome any disruptions in technology services or their businesses. Any kind of hazard like natural hazards, human-induced hazards, technological hazards or accidents can cause outage with serious impact on businesses. Therefore it is vital to have a Business Continuity Plan to survive a disaster. No company can afford to ignore the need for BC/DR planning, regardless of its size, revenue or number of staff. Some organizations cannot tolerate any downtime. These include financial institutions, credit card processing companies, health care industry, banks and even some manufacturing companies. The statistics reflecting the failure rate of companies after a disaster are alarming and serve as a wakeup call for all IT professionals and corporate executives. ESDS’ IT disaster recovery services help customers to have business continuity even in case of a disaster.

The crucial factors to be considered while designing a DRS are

• Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD) : Maximum Tolerable Downtime can be defined as the utmost time a business can tolerate the absence or unavailability of a particular business function which is heavily dependent on IT services
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) : Recovery Time Objective is the actual time taken to recover systems and resources (systems recovery time) that have been disrupted due to a calamity.
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) : Recovery Point Objective can be measured by the amount or extent of data loss that can be tolerated by business systems. For example, some companies perform real-time data backup, whereas some perform hourly or daily backups, further some perform weekly backups. If a company performs weekly backups, it means it can tolerate the loss of a week’s worth of data.