The clamor in the technology sector regarding disaster recovery and the absolute necessity of investing in it, protecting it, and improving it has reached fever pitch. This is understandable—turn on the news, and 2017 seems to have been littered with major natural events, previously unthinkable data breaches, and political intrigue regarding the loss, shuffling, storage, or dissemination of sensitive data. But what does that mean for a sizeable organization wishing to know just how well they would weather a storm, figurative or literal? And not just storms, but unexpected interruptions caused by freak accidents or unanticipated outages?
It would be difficult to assess any DR strategy without asking underlying questions regarding business continuity. To what extent can the business sustain disruption, and what is the management roadmap to access data needed to stay afloat? To what extent is the infrastructure capable of contending with a geographically specific or application or appliance specific intrusion?
These questions take us to an even more basic level than business continuity, the management and protection of data. While many IT consultancies have been eager to capitalize on the rush to firm up DR roadmaps and have sold hardware and software they felt were silver bullets to greater safety, the fiduciary responsibility to maintain best practice on behalf of clientele should be staggering in its broad-reaching implications. This is why it is vital for any organization prepared to partner in the securing of its data with an outside source to ally itself with deep experts in data management.
At ARKAY, we were birthed in the data management space. Almost thirty years ago, we began as a memory and storage shop and have grown and developed with the industry and the increasing complexities that come with disaster recovery. We are, in that sense, disaster recovery natives. The assessment of any disaster recovery strategy is extremely multi-faceted and involves the stress testing of virtual machines, the strength of fiber connections to the DR site, third party services used and their SLAs, time to recovery, and a host of other factors.
We thrive in this environment: our purpose is not to walk into a client’s office and pedal a particular brand or manufacturer that will make their problems go away. We are utterly consultative and have a dizzying array of offerings for both local and cloud usage that allow us to be truly agnostic when deciding what is best for our clients. We also advise regarding best practice: when was the last time you took a complete inventory of all devices and softwares? Do you know what your RTO (recovery time objective) actually is, and what it should be? Which personnel are responsible for what, and how are crises covered in your SLAs with outside sources? How often do you test a complete failover?
In the disaster recovery of data, the best choice you could possibly make is to partner with a firm that lives and breathes data management. This is who ARKAY is, and this is why, as a boutique firm, we are approached by major players, private and public, to lead the way.
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