What Excuses Do You Make When Asked about Your DR Plan – and You Haven’t Got One?

Do you have a plan ready for your IT infrastructure in the case of a serious disaster like a fire, flood, or earthquake? Chances are you have some form of Disaster Recovery (DR) environment in or near your business’ building, but if you were audited, would you pass with flying colors or flunk the test? Let’s take a look at some of the questions you should be prepared to answer when asked about your existing DR environment and how the cloud can help you achieve a more robust and highly available solution if a disaster were to strike.

How do you answer these common disaster recovery audit questions?

Where is your DR environment located? Is your DR environment located in a data center just across town or is it in another region? If your DR solution exists just miles away, it’s time to rethink your disaster plan. The best plan of action is to locate your DR environment in a different region in order to minimize the same disaster, a hurricane for example, from wiping out your IT infrastructure.

If your primary environment goes down, how long will it take your DR environment to turn on? This is commonly referred to as Recovery Time Objective (RTO). In the unfortunate moment when you do have to use your DR environment as your primary environment, how long does it take for it to be ready? If it takes a long time to get back up and running, you are asking for trouble as end users waste even more of your IT staff’s time calling to report the outage. Your DR environment should have your back and provide high availability, not create more of a headache.

How much data are you expected to lose if your primary environment is destroyed? This is commonly referred to as Recovery Point Objective (RPO). This question, in part, relates to the previous question about down time and how well your environments communicate with each other. In the case of a disaster you need to know if you are going to lose any data. A few minutes of data might be fine to lose, but any more than that and you may have a major issue on your hands. In essence, a lot of thought and effort needs to be put in designing a robust data replication strategy.

Does your DR environment perform as well as your primary environment? If your DR environment can’t perform as well or is less secure than your primary environment, you may have a problem. To have a truly effective DR environment, it should perform at the same level as your primary, which can be expensive when working with an on-premises solution.

How much does your DR environment cost to maintain? On-premises environments are costly to setup and maintain. Has your DR environment seen less love because all of your time and resources get redirected to your primary environment? A cloud DR solution may help you to lower costs while still achieving a high performing environment.

3 Reasons a DR Environment is More Achievable in the Cloud

1) More Cost Effective A DR environment is far more cost effective in the cloud compared to an equal on-premises environment. A lot of businesses just don’t have the resources to double the necessary hardware and create a DR environment that mirrors existing architecture.

2) More Efficient to Set Up DR environments in the cloud are simple and efficient to provision and configure and they are far more cost efficient than on-premises. Arisant Cloud experts can help you move all related software assets and data to your Cloud DR environment and you are ready to go!

3) More Locations to Choose From The cloud allows you to choose from a number of regions for your DR environment to live. You will no longer need to worry about the same disaster affecting all of your environments helping you to sleep easy at night.

If you’re ready to take advantage of a Cloud DR environment or simply interested in learning more about Cloud DR solutions, fill out the form below to request a Cloud DR consultation. Within the next business day, one of our Cloud architects will give you a call to discuss options and related costs.


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