Definition: Ability of the key operations of a business to continue without stoppage, irrespective of the adverse circumstances or events.
In real life, this means ensuring that the business has a plan of action and a technological solution that would enable its key staff to continue working during or following a major disastrous event such as fire, terrorism, theft, etc.
Disaster Recovery is the process by which you resume business activities after a disruptive event. Given the human tendency to look on the bright side, many business executives are prone to ignoring “disaster recovery” because disaster seems an unlikely event.
Every company should have a disaster recovery plan for recovering data and duplicating computer operations after a disaster occurs.
High profile events such as 9/11, as well as local issues such as last year’s London riots, prove the importance of having a functional and regularly tested DR solution.
Although online backups will safely store a copy of your data off site, in case of a disastrous event you will only be given your data back – not an operational server that is ready to continue running your business.
In practice, it will typically take 5-7 days to source a new server and then 1-2 days to reinstall your complete system and restore the data from online backup.
We also hate acronyms! But, as it happens RTO and RPO are of crucial importance to any successful business!
RTO is “recovery time objective”. In real life, this is the maximum amount of time a business can afford to be without its IT systems, following a disaster. (typically question asked by the board of directors is “How much money do we lose in an hour/day/week of system downtime”).
RPO is “recovery point objective”. This defines what systems are critical and therefore need recovering, and also to what state those systems should be recovered to.
With Purple Matrix BusinessGuard, we recover all your systems to a fully operational state, within as little as 1 hour!
Given the importance of DR, you would certainly think so. In reality however, not all IT companies specialise in DR, so although your current providers may be absolutely brilliant in day to day IT support, they may need some external assistance on the DR topics.
At the very least, your IT partner should make you aware of importance for a solid DR solution and work with you in order to achieve it!
Yes, in their thousands!
Managed DR services are becoming the norm because of £0 up front investment and low monthly fees (whilst offering highest levels of Disaster Recovery).
Our services and pricing are specifically designed for SME market segment.
Unfortunately this is simply not the case – more like one in five!
Around 20% of businesses will experience a disastrous event in their lifetime (e.g. fire, theft, flood, terrorism, vandalism, etc).
You wouldn’t drive your car without insurance, so why risk something far more valuable?!
Our managed DR service is amazingly simple, yet very effective.
The installation process takes about 1 hour, and is carried out in your offices by our disaster recovery experts.
Any Microsoft based server can be covered by My Business Guard.
Yes! Your data is encrypted as the snapshot is taken (encryption options avaialble are 128bit and even AES-256bit protection – a NIST FIPS-approved symmetric encryption algorithm – in other words, this algorithm is used by the FBI amongst other to protect its own data)
Think of a snapshot as a complete copy of your server at a given point in time. Not just the data contained on the server, but also the operating system, all the settings, everything.
A snapshot allows us to restore the whole server in a matter of minutes (as compared to hours or even days using more traditional methods such as tape/online backups).
Let’s assume the worst has happened – a terrorist bomb has gone off and your whole building is no longer there!
From the moment you invoke the DR plan, we can have you working again in as little as 1 hour (and certainly no longer than 4 hours!).
Because our solution takes snapshots every 15 minutes, you will only ever lose up to 15 minutes of work. Compare that with tape/online backup that at best runs daily, if not weekly!
Let’s assume you walk into your office on a Tuesday morning and your Exchange (email) server has malfunctioned. Your IT company are dealing with the problem, but it will most likely take a few days before they replace the faulty hardware and rebuild your server… (sounds familiar?)
One phonecall to Purple Matrix and we will ship a loan server to your office within 1 hour. Add another hour to restore your last snapshot and you can be fully up and running in as little as 2 hours.
Yes. Not only can Purple Matrix BusinessGuard act as a local backup, but unlike your current backup solution, our system can restore any file to any point in time. (typical scenario – you create a new spreadsheet at 10am and work on it for 2 hours. One of your colleagues then opens the spreadsheet at 2pm and accidentally ruin all the formulas/data… Your traditional backup solution will not even know about this file at that point in time.. We can however restore your file to how it was at 12:00 or 12:15 or 12:30.. Handy!)
We are not here to tell you what constitutes a disaster in your business. If you think the issue is significant enough and you need to Invoke – then push the button.
You can provide us with a list of key staff members that have authority to invoke DR.
After you clear a few security questions, we will need to establish the nature of the disaster and determine the best course of action (typical questions you will be asked will be “Is your building habitable”, do you have access to your local My Business Guard appliance”, etc).
Based on the information gathered, we will either restore your system to our virtual platform and tell you how to connect to it remotely; or we will send a loan server to your office and restore your system on your network.
Yes, because your data is safely stored and verified in our data centre, we can restore your last server snapshot to our virtual platform even if your complete building, including all your IT hardware is no longer there!
No. We are here to offer a DR solution, not sell you expensive hardware!
There is absolutely no upfront investment required to use Purple Matrix “On Premise DR” or “Offsite DR”.
This will depend on the nature of the disaster – we will either supply you with the data that you have added/changed whilst on our systems; or if you suffered a scenario where you end up buying a new server, we can restore the complete server image – leaving you with a fully functional server containing all your data and settings.