Your server room has just gone dark and eerily quiet and your backup power has failed to start. Or in another scenario every PC in the business is now demanding you pay a ransom in order to get your data back. Or a disk head has crashed and wiped out application data. Yes, it’s time to put your carefully worded Disaster Recovery policy into action. What more can possibly go wrong? (Of course there’s the story about the company who couldn’t access their DR policy because of a ransomware attack...).
Disaster Recovery is often not taken seriously in many organisations which is worrying because if you don’t then your organisation may not have a long term future. Simply defined DR is “the ability to return to “business as usual” operations after an IT failure, natural disaster, or other unexpected event, and is a key function of IT.”[1]
A poor response as a result of a disaster or more localised outage is often due to:
- Inadequate plans.
- Failure to test the DR plan
- Integrity of Backups compromised
- Management of the recovery process
- Neglecting human factors
- Cloud issues - for example hybrid cloud operations can be highly complex.
In addition research by IDC shows that organisations frequently do not have DR plans for all their applications.
Fortunately, for GroupWise users there is an excellent DR option available, with the no-nonsense name “GroupWise Disaster Recovery” that “is the fastest backup and failover tool available for GroupWise®, delivers quick message restoration as well as hot backups of post offices and domains, ensuring that critical data is always current and available. There are both on-premise and cloud options. This solution provides one-click GroupWise disaster recovery. With hot backups of the GroupWise system, GroupWise Disaster Recovery can immediately recover and fully restore all or any portion of your mail system – a domain, a mailbox, or a single email”. [2]
Micro Focus also provides more generic data recovery solutions to keep the business running or to get back up and running quickly again. Data Protector [3] provides enterprise scale and security for legacy and modern workloads. You can simplify and standardize data protection across physical, virtual and cloud environments with an adaptive architecture based on an advanced security model. It scales to billions of files, devices and media systems. It can provide near “instant recovery via native application integrations “.