Threats such as viruses, ransomware, and natural disasters that can cause significant downtime are growing by the day.

More and more organisations are waking up to the fact that IT uptime is synonymous with business uptime; any outages not only hit the bottom line they can also have a potentially catastrophic effect on your brand.

As a direct result, Disaster Recovery has become one of the key issues faced by every organisation that relies upon its IT systems to function efficiently and seamlessly. It is, to all intents and purposes, an insurance policy that you can cash in when disaster strikes.

And just like every insurance policy it has to be backed up by a comprehensive guide to the procedures and processes that come into place when the unthinkable happens.

This Disaster Recovery Plan should be one of the cornerstones of your organisation’s overall Business Continuity Plan, with the sole purpose of recovering and protecting your business IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster.

All well and good but creating and maintaining a truly effective and comprehensive Disaster Recovery Plan is a complicated, time-consuming, and ultimately thankless task.

The true cost of a Disaster Recovery Plan.

A comprehensive Disaster Recovery Plan has become one of the necessary evils that every organisation must undertake or in the event of a disaster deal with the consequences.

Most likely some poor individual has been charged with the responsibility for orchestrating your organisation’s plan. And while the buck might well stop with that individual, it’s your organisation that will pay the price if it isn’t up to scratch.

The cost of a Disaster Recovery Plan can’t simply be measured by how much it might save when disaster strikes, you have to factor in the ongoing costs of maintaining and continually updating your plan to ensure it is always fit for purpose.

So aside from the associated risk cost, you also need to factor in the costs of administering your Disaster Recovery Plan as an integral part of your overarching Business Continuity Plan (that’s assuming you have one. If not, we suggest you keep your fingers very tightly crossed).

The true cost of creating and administering a comprehensive Disaster Recovery Plan takes into account a wide range of factors.

To start with it requires detailed documentation about your network, every element in your system, who the vendor is for each element, and exactly how the system is designed to failover.

But it doesn’t end there, as all this documentation must be updated continuously and reviewed quarterly if you are to do it properly (and let’s be honest, most organisations don’t).

Then there is the Disaster Recovery Rehearsal which needs to be undertaken at least annually. In order to minimise any disruption, it usually takes place over a weekend, which means you may have to get people in on overtime. Even then, often DR rehearsals fail. The hard truth is that it’s not really a true test, yet remains a big administrative headache.

Finally, back to the poor individual who has to take responsibility for all the above. They may well know how the whole procedure works and are incredibly adept at filling in all the necessary documentation. But what if that person leaves your organisation or for some reason is no longer able to undertake this role? Then you are faced with a very large pair of bureaucratic shoes to fill.

When it comes down to it, while you can provide assurances that you have a Disaster Recovery solution in place, there’s always that nagging worry that even with the best intentions certain elements just aren’t going to work. As a result, when faced with the real deal, it’s ultimately going to take a lot of work to get your system up and running properly.

Well now thanks to Quadris, there is an ingenious solution that offers Disaster Avoidance instead of Disaster Recovery, and as a direct result eliminates the vast majority of the time, work, and stress associated with all the above.

Quadris’ ingenious Disaster Avoidance solution to the rescue.

The fundamental problem with most Disaster Recovery solutions, regardless of how good they claim to be, is that they focus on recovery. So even if they operate at maximum efficiency, they still involve an element of disruption and loss of data.

With Quadris’ Disaster Avoidance solution, the emphasis is on avoidance as opposed to recovery.

As it is completely automated it requires very little documentation. As a direct result, any Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery test can be undertaken in a lunchtime without any downtime.

To add to its appeal, user training is reduced to the absolute minimum, so even a junior member of staff can handle it.

Furthermore, with Quadris’ Disaster Avoidance solution, your overarching Business Continuity Plan is massively simplified. There is no need to sign Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) or Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) for your different workloads, as any failover is automatic and immediate.

The real beauty of this solution is that while you will be immediately notified if an event occurs, there will be no disruption to your service whatsoever.

Sound good so far? Well there’s even more good news.

Our Disaster Avoidance solution is typically cheaper than the cost of a Disaster Recovery solution.

Saving time and money on the cost of creating and administering a Disaster Recovery plan is actually the icing on the cake. The cake itself is the sheer ingenuity of our Disaster Avoidance solution which can deliver huge cost savings over typical Disaster Recovery solutions.

It’s cheaper for the simple reason that you haven’t got a whole load of expensive equipment sitting there redundant, just waiting for a disaster to happen. (For a more in-depth explanation behind one of the key elements of this future-focused solution, click here, or to read a case study of it in action click here.)

Your new plan starts here.

To find out more about our Disaster Avoidance solution and how it can benefit and protect your organisation, simply contact Peter Grayson on 0161 537 4980 or email peter.grayson@quadris.co.uk