Recovery Assurance Offices
Fundamentally, is our data protected from human error, hardware or software failure and theft?
Would our disaster recovery (DR) methodology enable us to recover completely from a larger adversity, such as a localised fire, power outage or a natural disaster, that destroys both the original data source and the local backup copy?
Further down the backup and recovery path, is our remote office data as well protected as our main datacentre data?
Does our DR strategy cover our critical business processes, software and IP?
Is our DR testing sound enough that it is would reveal potential problems before an issue or disaster arises?
Server Recovery Exercises
Many businesses assume that a successful backup will lead to a successful recovery; however, this is not always the case. Plan B's Server Recovery Exercise is a managed service that fully tests your ability to recover your servers from your backup, and offers a 24/7, 365 days per year emergency recovery service.
This process provides you with known recovery timeframes as at the date of your test. We complete a pre-test audit to ensure you are following best practice guidelines within your backup programme and provide recommendations on improvements to help ensure a successful future recovery.
Server Recovery Exercises can be done on separate equipment in isolation to your production environment or as a Disaster Recovery test on your own equipment using a variety of supported backup products.
Plan B's Server Recovery Exercises make it easy for you to:
- Get a proactive, independent analysis of your backup programme.
- Build confidence that you can meet your recovery timeframes.
- Be confident that your backup has been recoverable on to a server other than your own.
- Recover copies of your servers with no risk of impact to your production systems.
- Ensure that recovered systems work as expected.
- Access a full report on your recovery test, including indicative recovery times and recommendations for improvement.
- Activate Plan B recovery expertise to assist with your recovery (additional fees apply).
What our Server Recover Exercises Include:
- Annual offsite recovery test to prove critical services can be recovered to an offsite location.
- Recovery to independent hardware to prove the business can be recovered to disparate hardware if required.
- Demonstration that data recovery can be done by independent engineers, removing the reliance on in-house IT staff in a crisis.
Testing Your Business Continuity Plan
A Planned Activation tests your business' actual capability to respond to a crisis during a non-critical time.
Our Planned Activation methodologies can rehearse your people, test your server recovery, check phone diversions, review data communications access and also check and implement a physical setup in one of our standby office environments. The scope of your crisis event activation test will be customised to suit you.
A Planned Activation allows your organisation to test as much of your Business Continuity Plan as you require giving you confidence in your level of preparation for a real business disruption. The activation service can include your choice of:
- Assessing your Business Continuity and/or Disaster Recovery Plan objectives.
- Recommending the type of tests that would validate your business' recovery objectives.
- Preparing relevant test scenarios, learning objectives, and success criteria.
- Facilitating the staging and execution of scheduled tests.
- Capturing auditable team actions, communication details, improvements and lessons learned during the test.
- Developing pre and post-test action plans to fill the gaps, prioritise organisational issues and plan improvements to your business continuity programme.
- Recommending training and awareness agendas for test participants.
Possible Planned Activation Scenarios
Once we have prioritised your scenarios, the Planned Activation is aligned with what parts of your Business Continuity Plan you want to test, most likely one or more of the following:
- Loss of access to workplace building – short term (homicide, gas leak, adjacent building issue).
- Loss of workplace building (fire, flood, explosion, earthquake).
- Loss of key staff (death, pandemic, disabling accident).
- Loss of single piece of IT infrastructure (switch, router, server, ESX host, SAN, specialised equipment).
- Short term interruption to data centre (power outage, data centre move, communication/switching issue).
- Loss of all IT infrastructure (data centre fire, power failure).
- Loss of communications links (branches, head office, data centre).