Disaster Recovery

Helping your business plan and recover from IT disasters

Do you have a Disaster Recovery Plan in place?

What will you do when disaster strikes? Planning and knowing in advance the actions you will take to recover from a disaster can significantly improve the recovery time and get your business back up and running should the worst happen.

Before diving into Disaster Recovery planning, the first step is to make sure you have a good, verifiable backup regime for all your business-critical data, whether in the cloud or on-premises. When considering disaster recovery, there are a couple of metrics that need to be determined by the business’s senior management to ensure the Disaster Recovery Plan is adequate.

RPO – Recovery Point Objective defines the maximum amount of data loss measured in time to the last recoverable backup. For example, if you backup daily at 10 pm and then perform a disaster recovery at midday the next day, then the RPO is 14 hours.

RTO – Recovery Time Objective defines how long it takes to recover from an incident until normal operations are available to users. For example, if it takes 4 hours to restore a server until it becomes operational again, then your RTO is 4 hours.

In an ideal world, both the RTO and RPO would be close to zero, but generally, the cost of such a solution would be prohibitive to most companies. Another consideration is that not all Line of Business Systems require the same RTO and RPO.

Kriston Technology can help you protect your data and configure backup and verification jobs, and manage and monitor them for you. Using the industries leading vendor Veeam, we can help you protect your data on VMware, Hyper-V, and physical servers to both local and offsite destinations.

Kriston Technology is Veeam Cloud Service Provider.

Once verified backups are in place, we can work with you to develop your Disaster Recovery Plan and validate it by performing a test recovery. The Disaster Recovery Plan can be site specific, server specific or Line of Business specific. We recommend annual testing or after any significant change in infrastructure.


5 Key Elements of a Disaster Recovery Plan

  • Identify a Disaster Recovery Team – Assign a team responsible for creating, implementing and testing the plan. Include contact details and how to communicate.
  • Evaluate Risks – Assess potential risks and the measure in place to mitigate from them. For example, data corruption, ransomware attack.
  • Line of Business Application Identification – what are the core applications your business relies on.
  • Backup Regime – Implement a verifiable backup regime for all the Line of Business Applications identified. Define an RPO and RTO for each.
  • Testing – Test the plan on a regular basis and when there are significant changes to infrastructure and Line of Business systems.

Taking the next step

If you need help and assistance in creating a Disaster Recovery Plan for your business critical IT systems, call Kriston Technology today on 01993 80 980, or fill in the form below.

Contact us for advice on Disaster Recovery