Michigan Disaster Recovery

A solid backup and disaster recovery plan is essential to long-term Michigan business success – in the event of a disaster, your business can’t afford to lose valuable data and applications. As critical functions of our businesses rely heavily on the Internet and applications to operate on a day-to-day basis, a disaster recovery plan is also critical to maintaining the availability of websites and entire network systems.

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.

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

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.

Disaster Recovery Blogs:
Disaster Recovery & Backup with PCI Hosting Providers
I wrote about PCI compliant hosting data storage guidelines last week, and transparency with PCI cloud hosting providers in July, but not much focus has been placed on the PCI DSS standard 12.9.1 that requires organizations to create an incident response plan in the event of a system breach. As a PCI hosting provider, that translates into offsite backup and disaster recovery as the complete incident response solution to ensure that data and applications are safe should any issues in availability or uptime arise.

Disaster Recovery for HIPAA Applications – It’s All About Availability of PHI
HIPAA – The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act focuses on three key criteria for handling Protected Health Information (PHI): availability, confidentiality and integrity. This blog post focuses on availability as it applies to HIPAA applications and HIPAA data.

Cold Site DR is Dead. Long Live Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery!
A decade ago, companies like SunGard grew very quickly by selling a solution most of us would call “cold site disaster recovery.” In essence, SunGard compiled a number of physical servers and compute capabilities, then leased these servers to many companies to be used in case of a disaster on a first-come, first-served basis.