Featuring ShadowProtect StorageCraft & Veeam Backup & Replication

Businesses should be prepared for the possibility of events affecting their IT systems that may have a serious impact on their ability to conduct business. At Ramkey we work with our clients to design and test strategies to minimise the risk of downtime from such events, but if downtime does occur for whatever reason, we suggest having procedures in place to reduce the amount of downtime and get the IT systems back up and running quickly, in accordance with the client’s Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

Disaster events may include hardware failure (whether servers, routers, switches or workstations), Internet connection failure, power outages (whether short or longer term), data corruption or malware/virus infection.

We work with clients to suggest and implement mitigation strategies. As a minimum this includes having on-premise servers that are protected against power loss, malware/virus infections, and disk failure (through disk redundancy techniques). We also insist on a backup strategy that allows a timely restore of corporate data as required, and if necessary a full restore of the on-premise servers to backup hardware or virtualised server.

The most severe form of disaster may involve a complete relocation to temporary premises, for example if the business is severely damaged by fire or water. In this situation the entire IT infrastructure may be unavailable or inaccessible, making it necessary to install new or temporary infrastructure to keep the IT function going.

However the most common type of disasters these days are server failures (often hard disk related) or data corruption (caused by malware). In both scenarios the backup system is critical in allowing a speedy restore to get the business operational again. Having a standby redundant server onsite is the best way to get the failed server back online quickly. In that scenario we would have a continuous server backup running to the standby server, such that a cutover to the replacement server would be relatively swift and painless from a user point of view. In situations where there is no redundant or failover server, we would work to restore the failed server to a temporary machine or virtualised location, but this of course may take longer, depending on the hardware resources available.

To mitigate risks of data loss and to protect business critical data we recommend StorageCraft ShadowProtect backup software for Servers and Workstations.

For replicating virtual servers to secondary host Hyper-V servers we recommend Veeam Backup & Replication which can facilitate instant boot in the event of a disaster or hardware failure on the primary Hyper-V server.