Creating A Disaster Recovery Plan Using An Offshore Server - By: Chris Harmen

The internet has become an integral part of nearly every business plan. E-commerce has opened up new avenues for companies to market their goods and services and connect with customers and vendors alike. The benefit of virtual storefronts and online customer management has even created a number of highly successful companies that conduct their business solely online. In this business climate, a disaster recovery plan is essential to ensure business continuity. If IT resources are brought down, every company needs to have a contingency in place in order to keep their business running.

Disaster recovery planning is the cornerstone of ensuring business continuity. In general, redundancy in IT systems is one of the most effective ways to keep online business components running in an emergency. With offshore servers and secure hosting, this is affordable and easy to achieve.

Colocation Services To Handle Contingencies

When a company uses colocation, they are renting out rack space in a secure hosting facility. The client has total control over their own hardware and software, configures their own system, and makes all the important decisions. The IT firm houses their clients' IT resources within their auxiliary facility and uses their own infrastructure. For disaster planning, colocation places all the equipment off site, protecting the valuable resources from any disaster or emergency that might strike the home office.

Overall, colocation provides a company with total control over their IT resources, but utilizes the specialized hosting facilities of a technology firm to house, protect, and physically maintain the hardware. In this arrangement, the home office could lose power, be damaged in a storm, or any other emergency, but their technology equipment will still be up and running.

Offshore Servers And Disaster Recovery

Similarly, many companies opt for shared or dedicated offshore servers to run their web pages and online applications. Utilizing a secure hosting facility in this manner provides the same benefits as colocation when it comes to an emergency situation. In addition, managed services are available so that the housing facility can also provide monitoring, maintenance, upgrades, and take care of all of the overhead associated with a technology implementation.

Many businesses do not realize how powerful these arrangements are until a real emergency occurs. Sometimes, a disaster can be as localized as a power outage on a city block. Other times, a major storm can disable an entire region for days or weeks. In these situations, many businesses fail to recover at all, and if they do, they still tend to go bankrupt due to the downtime. That is why disaster planning and recovery is so important; any business with an offshore server can still run the online components of their business no matter what happens to the home office.

Managed Services To Provide Security, Reliability

Contingency planning also has to account for intentional damage or loss. A malicious user can bring down a website, hack a database, or steal confidential information. These situations can also be a disaster when it comes to business continuity and legal liability.

Security and reliability in today's virtual environment is paramount. The rising cost of identity theft and cyber vandalism can put a real strain on many companies. Rather than trying to manage an in house department to fight the latest security threats, many companies opt to use managed services. This entails contracting a tech firm that will perform all of the necessary security upgrades, updates, and monitoring as well as reacting to potential threats. As a component of emergency planning, these secure hosting and managed services cover manmade disasters.

Preparing For The Worst - Redundancy

Even for a company that has a total technology implementation, an in house staff, and their own facility, redundancy is crucial for disaster recovery. No single system is fool proof so having a backup that is ready to go at a moment's notice will cover all of those fluke situations that just can't be prepared for ahead of time. In the worst case scenario, any company with an offshore server as a layer of redundancy can ensure continuity no matter what happens at the home office.

Even companies that already utilize an offshore server for their IT needs can use a redundant system at another facility. Many IT firms will have more than one facility using separate infrastructure, making it easy to clone a system and have a contingency plan in place.

In the end, disaster recovery plans have to account for every contingency possible. With an offshore server and secure hosting, it is easy to create a comprehensive contingency plan.

About the Author

Chris Harmen is an author for Secure Hosting, a Caribbean based IT firm and industry leader in secure hosting and offshore servers solutions since 2001.

Article Directory Source: http://www.articlerich.com/profile/Chris-Harmen/89665

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