The challenge facing any group of users is to understand what they want and what they need from their back-up strategy and also what they can afford, for indeed almost anything is possible.  Back-up startegies can range from instantaneous mirroring and replication, log shipping of incremental data, multi site copies and myriad hi-tech solutions, down to taking a weekly tape back-up and keeping it in a fireproof safe.

The greater the level of instantaneous copying and moving of data, the greater the level of cost, and more crucially the greater the draw on processing resource. 

Put bluntly, whilst absolute data security can be afforded, if it slows your systems down to the point of non-viability, the strategy will not fly.

Look at your needs from a non-IT standpoint

1. How long can your business run transactionally without the cover of a copy of your activity.  In other words, what level of re-keying will kill you!

2. What is the nature of the activity being backed up.  Financial data will usually require the greatest levels of robustness.  Stock movements and transactions, personnel records or the like, can survive being re-keyed.

3. How does data-availability interact with other areas of disaster recovery.  Having great data available is useless if there isn’t a working environment to use it in.  Disaster recovery is not an IT issue, it is a business issue.

4. Break your levels of disaster down into grades.  Your reaction to a power outage is different to your premises being destroyed by fire.  You will suffer a power cut in the next two to three years, hopefully, statistics decree, that less of us will suffer major fires.

5. The most likely disaster you will suffer is someone accidentally deleting or corrupting a file, therefore a roll-back copy is needed.  This should be your start point, not the doomsday scenario.

The best strategy, as business users, is to quantify your minimum and optimum requirements stated in business language.  Give this to your IT department or to your service provider (better still ask GTS–Solutions).  Let them cost their suggested solution.

Question them closely on how these solutions might effect your business systems performance.  Can you afford that draw?  Question back-up efficiency in terms of ‘how long.  i.e. if I lose a file, how long before you can restore it?    If we suffer a fire outage, how quickly can an emergency service be put in place based on backed up data.  Exactly what kit, and infrastructure is needed to facilitate this?

Be specific, ask direct business questions, and be realistic.  As a business, having a workable Disaster Recovery solution is your responsibility, not one you can just hand over to an IT provider.  You understand your business – they don’t.