Disaster Recovery Planning

As Leapfrog continues to identify the common technology challenges for mid-sized businesses, we are not surprised to find that roughly 20% of companies still do not have any type of disaster recovery plan in place. For those companies that do, most have not considered the policies and procedures for restoring their data if a disaster occurs. If you are not a Leapfrog client and either your company, department, or project workgroup does not have a disaster recovery plan, ask yourself these questions: "How much data can I afford to lose? Could we lose a week's worth of data and be able to reconstruct it?" Most could not, particularly in the realms of accounting, inventory, and order placement.

One common misconception in the marketplace is "My company has a nightly tape backup, so I should be OK." A daily local tape backup is the most common form of data backup that companies implement. Daily backups provide a good compromise between price/practicality and the necessity to recover data. Although this is comfortably the position of many who work with critical data, it does not necessarily provide the data accessibility that most expect from their disaster recovery solution. How quickly can you be up and running again with your critical data after a disaster? If the processor in a server dies and it will take two to three days to get replacement parts, what good is your daily backup in the mean time? Even in the case of accidentally deleted critical data, how long does it take to locate the files on backup tapes and restore them to a server?

The Benefits of Internet Based Data Backup

Internet-based data backup and recovery solutions, provided by companies such as Leapfrog, address this concern directly by offering not only off-site, managed backups but also rapid recovery of critical data. Data is backed up over a high-speed Internet connection to the service company's servers. Depending on your needs, you can backup only your most critical data, usually a client database, or backup your entire server with a more comprehensive service plan. The backups are monitored in real time for success, so you don't have to cross your fingers or plow through daily backup logs. If data is lost, the service company can push the data back down to your server over your Internet connection, minimizing restoration downtime. In the case of a dead server or location disaster, such as a fire or flood, your data can be restored to an alternate server even at an alternate location.

Off-site storage of any kind, Internet-based or traditional, greatly improves a company's disaster recovery capability; however, storing tapes off-site still can be inconvenient. Retrieving a tape, much less the data from a tape stored off-site can take an unacceptable amount of time in today's business environment.

Lastly, for the those who already have a disaster recovery plan...Test it! Not only to make sure that the backup process is functioning, but to test how you will access your data if your server becomes unavailable. The goal is to answer the important question: "How long will it take from the point of disaster to have full access to our data?" For now, Leapfrog believes our Internet-based data backup and recovery services, combined our client's local tape backups offer a redundant and appropriate solution.

This article originally appeared in the September, 2002 issue of FrogTalk.

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