Opinion: The recovery position

The ability to recover quickly from disasters is increasingly seen as a matter of competitive differentiation for many businesses, and so it is vital to keep abreast of the latest global developments that support this.

With the recent riots across London and other UK cities still fresh in our minds, it is clear that businesses need to be prepared for the unexpected and to ensure they are able to withstand any eventuality.

Disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity are two issues that sit beneath governance, risk and compliance. They are part of the strategic framework and as such are the responsibility of an organisation’s senior management. Therefore, there must be absolute confidence in the reliability of the technology and manual processes that create backups.

In the first instance, it is important to identify how long the business can afford to be down (recovery time objectives, or RTOs) and how much it can afford to lose (recovery point objectives, or RPOs).

Many organisations are engaged in critical business areas; medical or financial, for instance. They would be unable to withstand even very short RTOs or RPOs. The requirement here is for continual availability and access. People’s livelihoods could depend on it.

This high availability can either be provisioned by storage area network solutions, the complete duplication of infrastructure, or variations on these principles. Most modern businesses can tolerate short-term RTOs/RPOs and are said to have a near-high availability requirement.

This is where continual data protection (CDP) comes into play and is considered the new benchmark for data backup.

Under the CDP model, data is continually mirrored from an organisation’s servers. Best-of-breed CDP systems integrate with a wide spectrum of database, messaging and file systems. This places active applications in a stable state so they can be backed up with complete transactional and point-in-time integrity; for example, as a “snapshot”. As a result, all essential information can be recovered quickly, without the need for lengthy verification processes.

Changes to the mirrored copy are continually logged, allowing a rapid recovery to any point in time, effectively enabling a roll-back to the most relevant image and providing the shortest time to the continuation of business.

Locating, copying or replicating data to remote sites is the best way forward to ensure it is not destroyed by the loss of a place of business - this is where tape backup fails.

Virtualisation uses this principle and, combined with CPD, represents the optimal balance between the cost of the solution, the management of risk and the speed of DR.

This ultimately meets the DR requirements of most organisations and allows them to enjoy not only near-high availability but also the competitive advantage this offers their business.

Simon Kelson is managing director of Atlanta Technology