Best Practices in Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity Planning - Disaster Recovery: Moving Data to Safety

Disaster Recovery: Moving Data to Safety

If you have a single data center, consider how and where you want to move your data out of harm’s way. Solutions could range from purchasing a high-quality fire safe and putting backup tapes inside it each night, to paying for a remote hot backup site where the servers are constantly running and the data is being replicated in near real-time.

The migration process could involve a combination of steps, such as making backup tapes and moving them to a remote location on a set tape-rotation schedule, and then replicating data to another storage repository across the Internet.

“We looked into building our own backup site in-house, but the cost was about the same as paying for a provider, plus we would have had to pay for the entire costs up front,” says Abner, who added that CIB Information Services ended up going with SunGard. “While I think SunGard is our best option, I caution anyone to make sure their initial contract will handle all sorts of situations.”

For Miles and Stockbridge, a Baltimore law firm, multiple data centers or off-site storage would have been too costly, so the company has been “moving toward as many hosted solutions as possible,” says CIO Ken Adams. The firm, which previously used Postini for its e-mail spam and anti-virus protection, switched to the hosted service from Mimecast. “All my e-mail goes through their service,” he says. “They do the journaling and archiving, and I don’t have to worry about backups.”

The company also converted from PCDocs to NetDocuments’ hosted document management service. “Law firms live and die by their documents, but I don’t have to index them or worry about backups with NetDocuments, since they are off-site,” Adams says.