It is undeniable, available applications at all times are crucial to guarantee the health of any organization. When the internet is down for an hour, people start to scramble, and we start to see sweat dripping from many foreheads. Now imagine that all your applications suddenly become unavailable. No follow-up, no orders, no CRM, nothing. The only thing you can do is hope that everything will go back to normal as soon as possible, but nobody knows when. This scenario is every organization’s biggest nightmare. Only the ones with a Disaster Recovery scenario in place are able to sleep soundly at night.

What causes an application to become unavailable?

There are several reasons why your applications suddenly become unavailable. The most frequents are hardware failures and human errors (intentional or not). But other less obvious disasters such as fire, water damage, power outage, lightning strike, etc., although less common, could also happen. We are also noticing an increase in cyber threats such as cryptolockers or hacking. Both of these attacks are perfectly able to shut down your entire data center/organization in no time.

Fortunately, solutions exist to help you get back up and running as quickly and efficiently as possible. Here are a few examples.

How to reduce downtime with "off-the-shelf" Disaster Recovery solutions?

Backup restore

Initially, it is recommended to do a backup restore test at least once a year. The backup is tested on a secondary system, after which a report is made. This report confirms whether the backup is restorable and also indicates which virtual machines should be restored first. The order of VM restores is determined by dependencies, criticality and restore time. All in all, a backup restore test guarantees that you will be able to restart your backup and give you a solid restore plan, but it does not provide a platform for restoring the backup.

Cold Recovery Service

A Cold Recovery Service starts with an annual backup restore test so that a disaster restore plan is available.

The extra value of a Cold Recovery Service is that there is a standby environment ready to perform a restore. In case of disaster, you have the guarantee that you can restore your backup somewhere.

Quick Recovery Service

A one-on-one replication is provided to a secondary or tertiary environment. VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery can be used for this. Therefore, replication to a Datacenter is done according to the pay as you go principle. With a push of the button, applications can be restored in a VMware Cloud environment. This is done fully automatically and without intervention of your service provider. In other words, as a customer, you can perfectly activate the disaster scenario yourself.

One last tip: having a good disaster recovery plan is paramount for the continuity of your company. But don’t forget to test it. In case of disaster, you’ll know if it works, and you can act on autopilot!