Virtual Disaster Recovery ... is there such a thing?

Johannesburg, 19 May 2017
Read time 4min 20sec

Virtual Disaster Recovery (VDR), sounds like it could be one of the latest "buzzwords" in the realm of IT nowadays. Hearing something like "VDR" could possibly entice you to do some investigations (or delegate the task to someone in your IT department) to determine the possibility of its existence, to ultimately answer the question: "Is there such a thing?"

Before delving into the midst of VDR (Virtual Disaster Recovery), I feel that it may be beneficial, at this point to quickly recap on the circumstances that can be considered a "disaster" for your company.

Natural disasters are of course events that would interrupt or severely hamper a company's ability to continue to operate, either due to destroyed infrastructure (roads, telecommunications, electricity, etc.) or ability to access critical systems and data. Considering the underlying purpose of being in business nowadays - which is to make a profit - a disaster for a company cannot simply be reduced to that of being at risk of only natural disasters.

A disaster for a company planning their DR (Disaster Recovery) setup, must also include the following:

* Physical infrastructure failure;
* Power;
* Cooling;
* Telecommunications;
* Malware and/or ransomware;
* Fire;
* Deliberate attacks (hacking);
* Theft;
* Civil unrest; and
* Etc.

You could extend this to physical machine or applications failures, database corruption, etc., although those would be more in line with "Business Continuity" operations.

These are all events that can be construed as a disaster for your business. Essentially, a disaster is anything that would interrupt or infringe on the company's ability to do business. Whether they be caused by accident, incompetence, or deliberate acts of sabotage (internal and external).

VDR... is there such a thing? To answer the question: "Yes, there is such a thing as Virtual Disaster Recovery!"

Any company that has not put into place a Disaster Recovery Plan, needs to seriously re-evaluate the value of their IT infrastructure to the business. Databases, applications, customer facing websites and systems, interlinks to other trading partners/banks, in fact, any system used during the normal operation of the business is critical in the value proposition of a company. Without them, orders don't come in, invoices don't go out, money doesn't come in! No money, no operation! No operation, no profit!

The objective of any effective Disaster Recovery Plan is having the capability to get systems restored and running as quickly as possible. AgileCloud's VDR solution will enable your organisation to get back up and running in a fraction of the time it would ordinarily take, while enabling the added benefit of cost savings (both from a CAPEX and OPEX perspective).

The team of experts at AgileCloud, through our VDR solutions, are able to ensure that your business will operate as usual, within hours or even minutes of declaring a disaster event.

"But how could VDR, a mere three-lettered acronym, do that?"

First steps are to identify which systems and databases are absolutely critical to keeping the company operating during a Disaster Event, and which are nice to haves, and those that can be updated later.

Second, is to design the DR landscape - where it will run from, who needs access, how it will be accessed, how often it will be replicated (real time, periodically), etc.

Third, the technical implementation and testing. The VDR solution from AgileCloud makes use of best of breed backup software which will maintain up-to-date images of your servers and databases in a state of the art data centre. These images of your servers are configured into the server farm, tested and then shut down awaiting a test or an actual event. The full setup is tested in all aspects - from the actual backups of the machines, databases, access, activation etc.

This means there is no time to build machines needed, they simply need to be started, databases updated from latest backups, and access enabled. Obviously, the cost of keeping a disk image of a virtual machine is much lower than always on virtual machines! Additionally, you don't need to purchase any hardware, rack space, etc. bringing your costs down even further! You only pay RUNNING costs of the VDR setup when you are actually running it!

A VDR setup is of course next to useless if it isn't tested regularly! So, our solution gives you the ability to have scheduled tests as often as you like. These could be simple is the machine running and is the data accessible and up to date, right through to full user testing of applications and processes.

If you'd like more information on Virtual Disaster Recovery, chat to AgileCloud. Its expertise, technologies, and services will help you build, implement and maintain a full VDR environment for your organisation!

AgileCloud - your silver lining is its way.

Editorial contacts
AgileCloud Brendan Elario (+27) 11 447 4701
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