Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity: A Managed IT Services Approach

Disaster Recover (DR), Backups and Business Continuity (BC) are important to businesses of every size. While all businesses are different and have varied needs and goals, one thing remains constant; They need their IT infrastructure to remain functional, even in the face of a disaster or critical issue. These issues can come from a vast range of vectors including natural disasters, cyberattacks, Insider Threats and mistakes, and system failures just to name a few. It’s important to have systems and procedures in place to mitigate and recover from these kinds of disruptions. At FordhamIT we support local business of all sizes, throughout Newcastle, Maitland, and the Hunter Region.

What is Disaster recovery?

Disaster recovery is a set of processes and strategies designed to restore IT systems, data, and operations after a disruption caused by events like natural disasters, cyberattacks, hardware failures, or other incidents that lead to data loss or downtime. The goal of disaster recovery is to ensure that your business can quickly resume critical operations and minimise the impact of these disruptions on operations, reputation, and revenue.

What is Business Continuity?

Business continuity refers to the systems and processes that your business puts in place to ensure critical business functions can continue during and after a disruption. While disaster recovery focuses specifically on restoring IT systems and data, business continuity covers a broader scope, aiming to keep all aspects of your business operational, including people, processes, communications, and physical assets.

Data Backup and Recovery Solutions

The first step to ensuring disaster recovery, is ensuring you have a way to restore any lost information or systems. Having good data backup in place, that is regularly verified and tested is a crucial foundational step for your business. Data backups come in many forms including endpoint and server backups, cloud software backups, and Microsoft 365 backups. These backups should not be stored in just one location, they should use a mix of on-premises, off-site, and in the cloud, with a preference for a combination of these methods to reduce risk.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. This defines how much data a business can afford to lose before it impacts operations. Some businesses may be fine with data from the day before, others may need data from the last hour.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is a target time within which your businesses IT systems and data must be restored to avoid unacceptable impact to your business. Businesses that require shorter time objectives can have systems in place that recover a downed service or server in a very short amount of time.

Proactive Monitoring and Maintenance

As an MSP, FordhamIT completes proactive monitoring and maintenance on servers and endpoints. This aims to resolve and fix minor issues before they become major ones. Before your Team are even aware of an issue. The regular maintenance of machines through updates, patches, and testing ensures that they are kept secure. Ensuring good cyber hygiene can avoid many common threats. Through our endpoint hardening, limiting user access, and centralised security solution, we are able to respond to alerts in real time.

Testing and verification also play a major role in ensuring DR and BC are possible. There is nothing worse than having an issue, then when the time comes the backup isn’t recoverable; Or no one in your Team knows who is responsible for the recovery.

The Role of Managed IT Services in DR and BC

At FordhamIT or role as your MSP is to be the first point of contact. In the event of something going wrong, we will likely be contacting you first. Your Teams will know exactly who to turn for in the event there is a major issue.

This is what we do. Day in, day out we provide expertise, resources, and technology to ensure effective DR and BC for your business. Using an MSP to support your business means you have a trusted point of contact. We work with your business to know it inside and out. While our Joint goal is to do everything we can to avoid downtime, should an issue occur; we will be there to get you recovered quickly.

If you would like to see how a Managed service provider can help transform your business, see our article here.