One morning 6 years ago helped validate my perspective on the importance of system backups and disaster recovery. There was nothing special about this particular morning. I was getting ready for work as usual, when I received a call at 7:15am from our Office Manager. In her unique cut–and–dry way, she stated tersely, “Turn on the TV and check out the news.”
Flipping on the local news, I could almost feel the color drain from my face. Right there on TV was our office park, from the perspective of a TV news helicopter, buildings ablaze! The first thought that bullied itself forefront in my mind was,‘Do we have reliable backups and are we certain they are off–site?’
I jumped into my car and screamed directly to the office, but could only get to within about a half–mile of the entrance. At the side entrance of the park, I was able to get a visual on our office building. A huge wave of relief passed over me as I realized that although a building was on fire in our office park, it was not OUR building! I considered that one of a few “lucky breaks” the universe doles out from time to time. Events like that will – and should,if you’re being a good steward of your lucky breaks – inspire some pretty thorough examination!
We immediately evaluated our own internal backup and disaster recovery processes, and like the proverbial cobbler, realized we had some major holes in our own shoes.
- With no automated off–site backup, we had to rely on someone to take a backup cartridge off–site for safe keeping. In our case,we discovered this was not being done regularly or consistently.
- While we were getting good backups, the size of our data had grown significantly, and if we had a major server outage, the time to recovery would likely exceed 24 hours, possibly 48 hours. That’s quite a problem when we need to be up and working to ensure others are able to do the same.
We realized that many of our clients were likely experiencing the same types of issues that we were when it came to backups and disaster recovery.So we started redefining our own BDR process by first throwing out all of our old ideas and concepts of how backups should be accomplished, and started with a clean slate.
We set 3 primary goals for developing our new backup and disaster recovery solution:
- The solution must fit the needs and requirements of our clients.
- The solution must be fully automated, with no human intervention required once the system is setup.
- The solution must meet the most common AND most critical recovery requirements.
Be on the lookout for our upcoming white paper later this month to learn how the SPOT Protect Backup & Disaster Recovery solution from The Fulcrum Group meets AND exceeds our primary goals and keeps our clients protected from any disaster.Meantime, if you’d like to explore the topic more, start with our Data Protection page at https://www.fulcrum.pro/services/data–protection/ or contact your Fulcrum Group Account Manager with any questions you might have.