Choosing a Disaster Recovery Solution

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We asked our experts for their opinion on how to evaluate a disaster recovery solution. “The first thing you need to do is take a look at how reliant you are on your network and on email,” advises Michael Osterman, principal of Osterman Research. “If you’re using email just for communication purposes, simple transport, that kind of thing, you could go to a back up email system—and we’re talking about internal mail only—and still maintain a lot of that functionality. It’s not a very good way to do it, but you could do it and your company could still function sort of normally.”

Osterman goes on to say, “If you have a lot of customer facing communication, if you’re doing transactions, receiving orders, etc., via email, then disaster recovery means a very different thing. It means that if your email system goes down, you stop getting orders, customer emails start bouncing back and it damages your reputation.” Osterman thinks the second thing to consider is what is the likelihood of a natural disaster? “If you’re in the middle of the U.S. your likelihood of a disaster is not that high,” says Osterman. “There’s not that many bad things that can happen to you outside of a power outage from a blizzard or something like that. If you’re in Florida, then you’ve got a reasonable chance every year that there’s going to be two or three hurricanes so close to the state, that your power will be knocked out for a week.”

Andrea Skov, chief marketing officer at Teneros recommends that the solution be reviewed carefully, “Everybody and their brother is suddenly trying to get into disaster recovery risk—internal threats and external threats—and they’re not thinking through the requisites of the market.” Ben Petro, CEO of Teneros adds, “Companies should ensure that the solutions they are considering provide both local high availability and remote disaster recovery to protect against local technology failures or site-wide outages—providing immediate business continuity and data access, preventing workflow and operational losses.” He recommends that organizations choose disaster recovery solutions that back up MS Exchange and support all elements of the MS Exchange ecosystem such as the Blackberry Enterprise Server. “Look at the solution vendor’s roadmap for MS Exchange 2003 and 2007 and their plan for 2010—be sure the vendor secures your messaging platform—wherever Microsoft is going.” Lastly, says Petro, “Assure that the vendor offers a holistic solution to MS Exchange backup, failover, protection, and delivery, keeping end-users seamlessly connected to and fully operational on email.”

According to Paul D’Arcy, director of marketing for Dell MessageOne, organizations need to figure out how they want to allocate their resources and what’s important to them. “Usually they start by figuring out two things—what needs to happen during an outage or disaster? Is it okay to have downtime or do they want to make sure that they’ve got protection that keeps their key systems and business processes going? Secondly, how do they make sure they don’t have data loss and that they can fix anything that breaks afterwards?”

Alan Elliott, vice president of sales and marketing for Mirapoint, believes vendors should provide a comprehensive plan that includes software, hardware and a tightly coupled process, and that ideally the plan could be deployed in a turnkey fashion, leaving little room for error. “From a systems perspective the solution should have both physical and geographic redundancy, eliminating the chance of a local problem taking down your business. The concepts of disaster recovery and mission critical are inextricably intertwined. Surprisingly, the answers to the disaster recovery challenge are really more about process than technology itself.”