In a technology-driven world, the reliance upon IT is increasingly critical and, as such, presents significant potential operational and financial risks which prudent managers must plan to overcome. It is important for any business to understand what to do in the event of a disaster and whose responsibility it is to restore systems and data in the minimum time frame.

With the protection of a company’s data assets becoming the personal responsibility of company directors, businesses should be focusing even more on their internal data protection strategies.

However it is not enough to rely on this to ensure business continuance. IT disaster recovery should be a significant part of a business continuity plan.

Being able to recover your data and IT systems in a safe, secure and timely manner offers many benefits but all that this can be undone if other elements of the business do not function during and directly after a disaster.

There are many different definitions of ‘disaster recovery’ and it can sometimes be mistakenly defined as business continuity. In DR terms it is important that businesses today seek to achieve disaster avoidance and, where that is not possible, rapidly recover the business and its assets.

There are certain disasters that can't be planned for such as extreme climate change, fire flood and other events which regretfully have become a regular occurrence in an unpredictable and often threatening world. But there are other, just as damaging issues that can arise from theft, carelessness or intentional damage resulting from the introduction of viruses or hackers to the network.

Traditional disaster recovery service providers have, in the main, provided their customers with facilities and equipment. This service has been available to companies for years but in order for a business to function fully, the most important ingredient of all is missing and left completely to the client to recover…data.

Cerberus has been designed to address this issue through the introduction of 3 easy to understand and implement modular managed solutions:

The first tackles rapid disk based backup of systems and data both locally and securely offsite, the second provides disaster recovery of these systems in the event of failure of single or multiple systems and the third provides real time virtualized failover or replication of systems and data to a second sub-system.

At the heart of the Cerberus is Datashare’s Image Gateway Server (IGWS) which hosts disk based images of critical systems taken at mutually agreed periods. In the event of invocation of “Rapid Systems Recovery” the replacement system(s) are returned to the original operating state of its predecessor prior to the outage occurring. This is carried out by the dedicated operator based at the Datashare Management Control Centre (MCC).

To protect against certain environmental, logical and human disaster conditions an off-site mirrored copy of the IGWS data is taken and housed on either a dedicated or shared Image Data Centre Server (IDCS) based in one of Datashare’s facilities or in a client’s alternative office location. Further archival of data is provided with Cerberus to both tape and disk to 2 separate secure locations.

What ever your needs for a disaster proof data environment, Cerberus managed services can help minimize the affect that unplanned outages can pose.