Disaster Recovery
Community Guest Blog post by By Anne Thallman
Houston, we have a problem…..
Suppose there is a minor power outage…or a fire….or a tornado…or any type of disaster and your business is affected. Being unable to access key documents, mission critical applications, or your entire datacenter could be catastrophic to your employees, customers, and bottom line. What if you could mitigate these risks by ensuring that business decisions, processes, and tools to handle a calamity are in place well before a calamity occurs? Guess what? You can! In the technology world that type of planning is referred to as Business Continuity Management and you can learn more if you simply keep reading.
What is Business Continuity Management?
Essentially, Business Continuity Management is the strategy an organization puts in place in advance to handle crises and it consists of the business decisions, processes, and tools that will allow a company to weather any storm. In order to be up and running quickly following a catastrophe, overall business continuity management strategies should include the following elements: clearly documented procedures; offsite storage of key business records; clearly designated contacts in the event of an emergency; ongoing staff training, including practices and drills; and offsite recovery mechanisms. A good example of a product with features meant to be incorporated into a comprehensive Business Continuity plan is Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Features in SharePoint 2010 such as user data protection, data recovery, portal availability, and disaster recovery make information retrieval viable even during the worst scenarios.
For instance, user data protection relies on document versioning and properly using the SharePoint recycle bin functionality, empowering users to manage information recovery through the user recycle bin. Data recovery allows portal administrators to retrieve user documents, list items, sites, site collections, and entire farms through the use of backups. Portal availability is the degree to which a SharePoint Server portal is perceived by users to be available and resilient and is related to backup and disaster recovery. While user data protection, data recovery, and portal availability address the loss of SharePoint data and features, disaster recovery tackles total system loss. A disaster recovery plan must meet the needs of users, departments, and support staff. Standby farms in separate data centers are the most common route for ensuring disaster recovery preparation
Got Any Tips?
The most important aspect of any Business Continuity Management plan is making sure the team established to spring into action during a crisis is confident the plan will work!
For instance, here at CTS we employ a comprehensive approach to business continuity planning. Initially, a Business Continuity Assessment is developed, delineating system risks such as Server OS, Active Directory, SQL Server Configuration, and SharePoint Server. To ensure client comfort with business continuity best practices well into the future, CTS offers Administrator Training coupled with the Assessment.
Interested in Learning More?
Everyone has seen a news story recently about flooding along the Mississippi, tornadoes ravaging the South, or the earthquake in Japan. Disasters occur more frequently than anyone would like to see and to keep your business effective during one of these events involves solid Business Continuity Management. Please join CTS for a webcast titled SharePoint 2010: Get it Right the First Time that introduces key concepts for creating a SharePoint 2010 environment that will be scalable, highly available, recoverable in the event of an emergency, and ready to meet the demands of any organization well into the future.
When? Tuesday, May 24th at 11:00 AM
What? A webcast highlighting how to maximize the features and functionality of SharePoint 2010 using best practices to solve specific business problems
Where? Visit click http://www.learnitlive.com/class/939/SharePoint-2010-Get-it-Right-the-First-Time to register and obtain attendance instructions
