What should you look for in a Michigan disaster recovery provider and plan?
- Strategic location: Planning a Michigan disaster recovery strategy should include the location of your data center and production site - outsourcing your disaster recovery to a local Michigan hosting provider is ideal. With data centers located 53 miles apart on separate utility power grids that are connected with Gigabit fiber, Online Tech offers the ideal solution for both high availability production and disaster recovery sites. We provide warm site failover capability with high speed data replication and synchronization of your production servers at one data center with your disaster recovery servers at our other data center.
- Risk of natural disaster: Michigan also offers a unique geographical advantage, or alternative, for companies that need to host their data in a state with the lowest natural disaster rate, other than Alaska. Find out more about why Michigan is the ideal location for data centers.
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO): This refers to the maximum length of time a system can be down after a failure or disaster before the company is negatively impacted by the downtime.
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO): This specifies a point in time that data must be recovered and backed up. The RPO determines the minimum frequency at which interval backups need to occur, from every hour to every 5 minutes. Ask your Michigan disaster recovery provider what RPO their plan provides.
- Cloud-based disaster recovery: By virtualizing your servers, you can replicate entire servers and network configuration between data centers, providing faster recovery times for less than 50 percent of the cost of the production environment. Ask your Michigan disaster recovery provider if they offer cloud-based disaster recovery, and their estimated RTO and RPO.
- High speed access: Look for a way to connect and allow for rapid data replication from your production data center to your Michigan disaster recovery provider’s facility via a direct fiber or copper circuit. Check that your disaster recovery data center has a high availability network infrastructure to ensure uptime.
- Annual testing: Check that your disaster recovery solution is tested at least yearly to ensure it will work in the event of a disaster, before the disaster strikes.
- Compliance Audits and Reports: Has your provider been audited for certain compliance requirements, such as HIPAA or PCI DSS? Each requirement has specific standards regarding data backup and disaster recovery. Check that they know how to abide by the standards to avoid confusion that could lead to data loss or theft.
Read more about Online Tech’s Offsite Backup and IT Disaster Recovery solutions, and specifics on our Michigan data centers.
Disaster Recovery Case Studies:
Michigan Millers Mutual Insurance Company - A Disaster Recovery Case Study
Michigan Millers Moves from IBM to Online Tech to Improve Disaster Recovery Plan
Biotronic – A Server Colocation, Remote Offsite Backup and IT Disaster Recovery Case Study
Online Tech Provides High Availability and Secure Private Cloud Hosting for Monitoring Brain and Spine Surgery
DataMail – An IT Disaster Recovery Case Study
Online Tech Designs an IT Disaster Recovery System Capable of Recovery in Less Than 60 Seconds
Disaster Recovery E-Tips:
Benefits of Disaster Recovery in Cloud Computing
There are a lot of benefits with cloud computing – cost-effective resource use, rapid provisioning, scalability and elasticity. One of the most significant advantages to cloud computing is how it changes disaster recovery, making it more cost-effective and lowering the bar for enterprises to deploy comprehensive DR plans for their entire IT infrastructure.
Private Cloud Computing: A Game Changer for Disaster Recovery
Private cloud computing offers a number of significant advantages – including lower costs, faster server deployments, and higher levels of resiliency. What is often over looked is how the Private Cloud can dramatically changes the game for IT disaster recovery in terms of significantly lower costs, faster recovery times, and enhanced testability.
