Disaster Recovery:
Business continuity and more

A natural disaster doesn’t have to be a financial disaster.

The average IT group today has its hands full simply managing the day-to-day operations of the business. While they know that disaster recovery (DR) planning is important, it often gets pushed to the back burner by more immediate and pressing concerns. Even when a DR plan exists, frequently it is out of date and untested—well short of what is needed for reliable business continuity. The truth is that a proven, tested, and up-to-date DR plan is a necessary part of any organization’s IT operations. The risks of inadequate DR planning are enormous, ranging from a few hours downtime that is embarrassing and annoying to users to a significant outage—1 or more days—that erodes customer loyalty, causes significant losses in employee productivity, and damages the brand. The probability of a disaster occurring is uncertain. A DR plan is insurance: it provides a comfort level that a natural disaster will not result in a financial disaster. TorreyPoint has the experience and expertise to design and implement a DR plan for any business, government agency, or educational institution.

The TorreyPoint Disaster Recovery solution delivers a comprehensive, tested DR plan that is designed to ensure complete business continuity in the face of a natural disaster or human-generated catastrophe.

The DR plan should address personnel and business processes as well as critical information and the data processing platform.

Disaster recovery involves more than off-site storage and backups.  A DR plan should address all critical operations and functions of the business—in other words, look beyond the information and platform to the business processes and personnel that also must be brought back on line to keep the business running. The plan should include documented and tested procedures that will ensure the availability of critical resources and continuity of critical business operations.

The TorreyPoint DR solution leverages our experience with a wide range of customers through a disciplined approach:

• Audit: Review the existing plan thoroughly against business needs and industry best practices, and identify gaps and inconsistencies.
• Discovery: Identify and document the organization’s business continuity needs and requirements, including metrics such as Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective (RTO and RPO).
• Plan: Create a detailed, comprehensive, and executable plan that identifies existing and needed resources, and prioritizes tasks for the implementation phase.
• Execute: Implement the plan, including bringing up a backup site and other necessary tasks.
• Operate: Provide assistance in short- or long-term monitoring and operations of the backup network and other elements of the DR plan.

The TorreyPoint solution delivers peace of mind, cost savings, and other benefits

TorreyPoint has developed and implemented DR plans for a wide range of businesses, educational institutions, and government organizations.  The benefits of a well-designed and test DR plan include:

• Peace of mind.  Executive management can drive toward aggressive goals, confident that the business will survive and come back on line quickly after a natural disaster or catastrophe caused by human error.
• Cost savings. When problems occur, the ability to recover quickly can be essential to minimize the loss of employee productivity and preserve revenue streams that depend on online operations.
• Reputation protection.  Serious outages are often reported in the trade and popular press, causing embarrassment and degradation of the corporate brand.
• Customer loyalty and retention.  Business with service-level agreements (SLAs) should design their DR plans so that critical DR parameters such as RTO and RPO are consistent with SLAs.  Even business without SLAs must minimize outages to prevent customers from moving to competitors.
• High availability. Expectations are rising for corporate uptime—many organizations are no longer satisfied with four or five 9s, and are targeting 100% uptime.  Key elements of a DR plan such as failover and redundancy can aid in meeting these targets.

The bottom line is that an effective DR plan focuses on the business, not just the IT platform. TorreyPoint is the ideal partner for any enterprise, government organization, or educational institution that needs to ensure the continuity of its business operations—no matter what.