Getting assessed for DR

Given the fact that many businesses are prone to gamble with Disaster Recovery (DR), working on the basis that it will never happen to them and therefore (hopefully) saving money, the availability of more flexible, lower cost DR provided as cloud services can still be lost on them because they have never thought through the steps they need to take. So the arrival of a new DR planning service from iland could prove apposite.

Its new Disaster Recovery Planning and Assessment Service is designed to arm companies with the comprehensive analysis needed to plan and execute rapid recovery regardless of their IT footprint.

Though adoption of advanced recovery and cloud technologies is on the rise, reliable and rapid IT DR remains out of reach for many companies. In fact, some report longer recovery times and older recovery points despite newer technologies. The reality is that DR teams continue to struggle to accurately assess and analyse the diverse technical, procedural and business requirements that impact disaster recovery and business continuity.

According to a recent report by Forrester Research, “Technology such as virtualised high availability, replication, and continuity automation can improve the availability and recovery of specific systems, but they don’t address broader issues that are negatively affecting recovery capabilities, such as increasing IT complexity and the growing number of critical systems.”

The company claims it takes less than a week for its Disaster Recovery Planning and Assessment Service team to execute a thorough analysis of a company’s technical, procedural and business needs, as well as educating customers on key considerations that many overlook. It then delivers a recommendation that allows companies to prepare, implement and optimise the disaster recovery solution that best protects their unique business.

This includes a comprehensive assessment and analysis of procedural and technical needs, including the current protection strategy, objectives, resource and network requirements, end-user access factors, testing objectives, as well as failover and failback considerations, training customer staff to execute a self-guided performance/utilisation assessment, and analysis of the customer’s disaster recovery capacity requirements and configuration needs, based on the assessment data.

The company then provides comprehensive recommendations based on the customer’s disaster recovery goals, a customised demonstration of the recommended disaster recovery solution at work, and the freedom for customers to implement the plan with iland, internal IT or another vendor of their choice.

 “It is increasingly trendy for cloud vendors to offer disaster recovery as a service, but in truth, disaster recovery is a complex interplay of technology and process that requires experience to do right,” said Dante Orsini, senior vice president at iland. “In our seven years of working with thousands of organisations on tailored disaster recovery solutions, iland has the expertise companies need to protect their business.”