1. What do we mean by disaster recovery?

Disaster Recovery is an arrangement related to the preparation for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure which is critical to an organisation during a disaster. This arrangement encompasses the following:

• Processes
• Policies
• Procedures
• Technical arrangements
• Vendor arrangements

Disaster Recovery is a sub-set of ‘Business Continuity’ and focuses on IT or technology systems that support business functions.

2. With IT stability increasing all the time, and with the GCC’s relatively benign weather, how likely is it that companies will really face the disaster scenario?

There are different types of incidents that may qualify as disasters and that may strike at different magnitudes. These could be:

• Site Outages: due to Earthquakes, floods, fires, etc.
• Logical Outages: due to Virus Attack, Memory leak, data corruption, etc.
• Partial Outages: due to Hardware failures, Software failures, etc.

Subject to region-specific threats, preparation for disasters need to be accordingly carried out. This region is also prone to certain disasters and planning needs to be carried out after considering the potential likelihood of the disasters.

Stability of IT systems has increased over a period of time, along with increased awareness on IT disasters. CIOs are now investing in offsite disaster recovery sites as well as redundancy of critical components as threats cannot be ruled out completely.

Mohamed Rizvi

Manager-Information
Security & Advisory Services
eHosting DataFort

In spite of stability in IT systems and networks, threats on IT components do exist mainly due to mishandling, component failures and lack of conducive environment.

In this kind of a scenario, maintenance is key by providing a proper data centre environment that includes high end power and cooling systems and state-of-the-art infrastructure that is capable of withstanding disasters.

3. In an age where IT systems and telecoms links are more reliable than before, do we still need offsite backup solutions?

Yes we still need offsite backup solutions as organisations are still exposed to different types of threats. Based on the severity and likelihood of these threats, disaster recovery strategies are planned by enterprises.

Business continuity is assured by having an offsite backup (DR Site) solution which helps mitigate risks and reduces exposure to disasters.

4. Can offsite backup be an affordable, or viable, option in a market where bandwidth costs remain high?

In the Gulf region, bandwidth prices are higher than most parts of the world.
To make offsite backup affordable or viable, cost proposition of such a solution has to be looked at in different ways:

• Disaster recovery strategies can be based on a cost benefit analysis at the planning level.
• There exist disaster recovery solutions where optimum use of small bandwidth (pipe) is possible by controlling the utilization of bigger bandwidth.

This will help the organisation to maximize their ROI from a DR solution. Even among our customers, we have provided customised solutions to control bandwidth costs.

5. How much bandwidth does a typical local company need in order to maintain offsite backups of data and applications?

It is difficult to quantify the amount of bandwidth as it depends on the nature of applications being hosted at the Disaster Recovery site and how bandwidth intensive those applications are. Also depends upon the volume of data that has to be replicated offsite.

6. How receptive is the market to the idea of offsite backup? Doesn’t the customer see it as an expensive luxury that might never really be put into action?

Offsite backup (DR Site) is taken up by organisations depending on the criticality of the service and the threats the service is exposed to. It is mandatory for certain sectors such as financial institutions to have DR site services due to regulatory requirements.

Today, CIOs and IT managers are looking at DR solutions very closely and most organizations need a secondary site as a backup site to run their business along with having a primary production site. They understand the business challenges & realize that making IT services available to business is their priority. Therefore, based on these priorities, DR solutions are chosen and are not considered as luxury. It has become an important component of IT and business as the threats landscape has increased substantially in today’s environment.

At eHDF we have many customers who have opted for DR sites and DR seats solutions. DR sites serve as backup sites and with DR seats enterprises can avail of a scaled down version of office space to operate within eHDF premises in case of a disaster.