Phoenix Disaster Recovery Audit, Planning & Implementation Company

Disaster Recovery Photo

Disaster Recovery Planning & Implementation is the practice of ensuring that data is adequately protected and can be recovered in a timely manner after your computer network goes down or data loss occurs. Data loss can occur in any number of ways including:

  • human error
  • a computer virus
  • hardware or system failure
  • software corruption
  • theft, or a
  • natural disaster

When Disaster Strikes Your Business...

  • How much does it cost your business in dollars when you can't access your software applications and your staff cannot do their jobs and service your customers?
  • How much down time can your business afford if your people cannot access the data they need? Your office building went up in flames or was flooded, or your most valuable data is gone due to theft or a malicious hacker...
  • How much per hour will it cost your company in lost revenue, if your computer network goes down and/or data loss occurs, and your network cannot be restored right away?

A Disaster Recovery Plan is built around this estimated loss.

Do You Have a Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery Plan?

A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is a formalized plan that documents how to restore your computer network services and data if your business is interrupted due to a network down or data loss occurrence. The biggest benefit of a DRP is the development and discovery of how much it will cost your company to be down and how fast your network and systems can be restored.  The plan documents these procedures and includes telephone systems, network infrastructure, servers, desktops, internet access etc.; basically the systems and infrastructure that an organization relies on to do business.

Disaster recovery planning should be a regular activity for businesses of all sizes to ensure business continuity when disaster strikes. However, many small and medium-sized businesses are not adequately prepared to handle a network down or data loss situation today.

Some useful statistics:

  • 93% of companies that lost their data center for ten days or more as a result of a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. 50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately.
  • 30% of companies report that they still do not have a disaster recovery program in place and two in three companies feel that their data backup and disaster recovery plans have significant vulnerabilities. Furthermore, only 59% of companies polled test their data backup and storage systems at least once a quarter. Conducting a regular external audit of backup and restore systems is far from a common practice – only 32% report conducting an external audit.
  • At what point is the survival of our company at risk? 40% said 72 hours, 21% said 48 hours, 15% said 24 hours, 8% said 8 hours, 9% said 4 hours, 3% said 1 hour, 4% said within the hour.
  • 30% of all businesses that have a major fire go out of business within a year. 70% fail within five years.
  • Computer virus attacks cost businesses an estimated $55 billion in damages in 2003.
  • File corruption and data loss are becoming much more common, although loss of productivity continues to be the major cost associated with a virus disaster.

Kinetik I.T. is dedicated to support the future success of your business by addressing your data protection and business continuity needs in a cost effective way. The value that Kinetik I.T. can bring to your company is objectivity and specific expertise gained by working with many clients in varied industries.

Disaster Recovery Audit

A Disaster Recovery Audit is a cost effective solution prior to engaging in a full Disaster Recovery Planning & Implementation. An audit includes a specific checklist of tasks that we will independently perform and/or verify in conjunction with on-site staff – if any. This checklist will, at a minimum, include the following:

  • Verify that backup tapes for the past two weeks can be restored to a test server and that mission-critical and organization-critical data is valid.
  • Review procedures for natural disasters that may occur locally including fire, flood, earthquake, lightning strikes, or other potential causes of complete data loss.
  • Verify that core application data (e.g. e-mail, calendaring, and database) can be restored. Review backup practices and confirm that data loss windows are appropriate. For example, transaction logs backed up during the day can be appended to the last full backup to minimize daily data loss.
  • Review policies for off-site storage of backup media including security access.

Disaster Recovery Planning & Implementation

The services we are able to offer as part of this project include the following:

  • Planning – Smaller-sized customers are often unfamiliar with how to cost effectively match data protection requirements with technology. Assistance with evaluating data loss risks and recommending appropriate protection strategies is a high-value service offering.
  • Documentation – The outcome of the planning phase should be accurately documented to enable our customer to respond to disasters in a timely and competent manner. Documentation will include an inventory of data assets, backup technologies in use, backup and restore processes for various levels of data loss, and off-site storage and security policies.
  • Implementation – Our technical staff work with on-site staff to implement the technology and processes required by the disaster recovery plan. This may include installation of tape backup and/or disk-based backup hardware, installation of third-party software, and system configuration.
  • Testing – After implementation, the system and processes should be tested to ensure that backups work as expected and that data can be restored. We can provide this service on a periodic basis to ensure that the removable media are not defective.

Addressing Our Customer’s Challenges

Business Need Project Solution
Our business has a very small IT budget and we use the built-in utility from Microsoft. Why should we engage you for this project? Organizations with small I.T. budgets are often the most at risk of data loss because of inadequate policies and procedures regarding disaster recovery. For this customer, offer to provide a basic disaster recovery audit using our standard checklists and processes to help identify potential issues they can address on their own.
We need to keep our application servers up 24/7. Is Microsoft’s backup utility appropriate or should we consider a third-party utility? Microsoft’s backup utility integrates with Exchange Server and SQL Server but may not provide the level of online backup capability that a customer desires. Several third-party solutions are available that provide online backup to core application data stores.
We have several laptop users that store sensitive data. How can we protect against data loss and/or theft? Redirecting the My Documents folder to a central server and using Offline Folders functionality allow remote users to keep data locally while enabling centralized backups. Several third-party utilities are also available to support centralized backup or to enable users to initiate network-based backups.

Contact us for details on our Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning & Implementation services and we will be happy to assist you.