Overview
The winter of 2015 in New England had a concentration of large snow storms which shut down roads and public transportations for days. Businesses lost millions of dollar because their employees could not reach their offices. Our clients with disaster recovery plans were able to work through the same period when most businesses were closed. This was especially important for our mutual fund customers whom service and trade globally. We can help design, build, and test disaster recovery plans and reduce your company’s risks of being unprepared.
Planning
When planning for Disaster Recovery (DR) most companies approach the task thinking of all possible scenarios. This approach will always leave out an unknown unexpected scenario and leave a company unprepared. The better approach is to think about what could happen to your infrastructure. There are 3 infrastructure scenarios that will cover any impactful business event no matter what the event. This is the starting point of building a solid and complete disaster recovery plan. We provide robust DR strategies such as off-site data and server replication, secure storage in the cloud, as well as help designing and implementing cold, warm, and hot backup data centers that can support you when your primary work site is unavailable.
Implementation
Once a Disaster Recovery plan is approved we work on the technical aspects and some of the business operations aspect, to ensure the plan is in place. Technical documentation must be created for different aspects of the plan. In a DR scenario the resources available are unknown. Therefore the steps to be taken must be documented. We believe it’s important to conduct small preliminary testing prior to an annual test to minimize impact to the business. These small DR tests are part of the implementation process.
Annual Testing
While many companies have a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan, they rarely take the time to validate that it will work in the face of a real problem. Small changes to productions systems and business operations overtime can lead to big problems on the DR systems. Annual testing identifies these issues and potential gaps to improve your DR solution. Annual testing is very important! The Charlton Group provides careful planning and testing of your disaster recovery solution to ensure that it works. After the test we document the gaps and resolution, and provide two overview documents, one for internal stakeholders and the one for customers.
