A Guide to Disaster Recovery

What Is Disaster Recovery Planning?

A typical organization depends on many different technologies to run its business. Disasters can affect any of these technologies, and a disruption to even a single service can have a major impact on your business. A comprehensive DR plan is essential to minimizing downtime and preventing data loss in the face of disaster.

Disaster recovery planning includes all the work done to assess your company’s readiness to withstand such a disruption or crisis, as well as developing a targeted strategy to protect against disasters.

DR planning can consist of

• data backups
• failover and failback processes
• high availability protocols
• data protection
• data loss avoidance solutions

In today’s volatile global marketplace, these are vital.

According to TechTarget, “having a disaster recovery strategy in place enables an organization to maintain or quickly resume mission-critical functions following a disruption.” And according to the National Archives & Records Administration in Washington, 93% of companies without DR go out of business within a year.

Disaster recovery plans include provisions for the protection of IT and network data, as well as the steps needed to ensure business resumes as quickly as possible. Organizations often choose secure, off-site data center locations and/or the cloud to store data and data backups as part of a DR strategy.

Does your business have a robust disaster recovery plan and solutions in place to efficiently restore your data and services and get you back on track quickly, or even avoid disruptions to your operations? Quest can help you with essential business continuity consulting, evaluating your current DR setup, developing a detailed disaster recovery solution from scratch, and providing comprehensive DR testing and defined solutions.

What Is Business Resumption (BR) Planning?

Your BR plan covers the steps to resume business activity, or restore your business entirely, after a crisis. It focuses on preventative measures and the actions needed to resume business activities after the disaster.

In some BR planning, companies identify temporary work locations for staging business resumption until corporate headquarters and other offices or plants can reopen. Business Resumption Centers (BRC) allow you to resume operations quickly in a safe location. Many BRCs allow you to configure the space into the functionality you need, from private office space to command centers.

What Are Data Centers & Co-Location Facilities?

Data centers and co-location facilities can be used to get your data off the premises to a secondary site that houses IT equipment, stores data, and provides supplemental IT staffing expertise. Many organizations use data centers and co-location services as a cost-effective alternative to building and maintaining their own data centers.

With co-location, your company can house your servers and networking equipment in a third-party data center that offers customized cabinet and cage solutions, temperature control, and a highly redundant and resilient power supply. Co-location data centers can also provide contracted IT experts to monitor and troubleshoot issues.

Data centers and co-location facilities often house the backups of an organization’s critical data and can be used during and after a crisis to ensure business continuity and resumption. Some data centers and co-location facilities are designed as service delivery centers and high-availability business centers for use as a temporary workspace during and after a disaster.

Quest offers flexible, customizable space for your data, equipment, and staff. Through our global network of leading-edge Service Delivery Centers (SDCs), Quest provides efficient, reliable, 24/7 power for your data and systems, as well as secure, temperature-controlled spaces in which they can reside.

Two of Quest’s California sites, our High Availability Business Center (HABC) and Business Resumption Center (BRC), can yield security and high availability when you need it most. Both sites are SSAE 18; SOC 1, 2, & 3 compliant and situated in one of the most seismically stable and secure areas, located well above the floodplain, clear of any mudslides or forest fires, and far enough inland from extreme weather.

The HABC and BRC’s open floor plans can be configured for private office space up to fully appointed command and control centers. The buildings are monitored 24/7 and feature robust infrastructure and network equipment. Your company can choose to use the HABC or BRC to establish a permanent onsite presence, as office space, or as a location for post-disaster business resumption activity.

Besides these California sites, Quest also has a network of co-location data centers across North America and beyond. Each of these is well-equipped to house your data and systems, and help you recover from disasters as well.

Case Study – Redwood Credit Union

Early one morning, Joe Peyton, Assistant Vice President of IT Operations at California’s Redwood Credit Union (RCU), got a distressing phone call from his CIO. Disaster was about to strike: a wildfire was threatening RCU’s headquarters.

Peyton sprang into action and made critical decisions based on the Disaster Recovery and Business Resumption Plans that Quest helped put in place. As a result, the company’s site was saved.

Peyton’s firsthand experience with a disaster has since caused him to regard BC/DR as a core component of everything RCU does.