When the top management at ‘Help at Home’ set down to look over a complete BCP/DR solution, they were confronted by an undeniable truth – all of them were really very expensive.
Help at Home, a company of 13,000 workers, having a presence in nine states, assisted the elderly and disabled with household chores and health care.
They had all their operations automated with VMware servers, and backups were with SonicWall’s continuous data-protection appliance. However, the standby systems weren’t backing up operating systems or imaging any servers. Result – in case of an outage the system could only retrieve files and databases, whereas they had to lose all the major application configurations.
Their first consideration was to make one of their 85 offices a fail over site. But duplicating the infrastructure and maintaining the site was a bit costly - $190,000 over three years, almost a dead investment until some disaster struck. Instead, they found a Texas – based cloud infrastructure vendor. It pulls up their data via a VPN and syncs it with the databases usually on nightly basis or depending on the criticality of the information. The best part - all this happens in only $48,000 over three years saving almost $140,000.
No doubt it seems easy and money-saving to let others handle your data backups in a cloud, well there is always a different side too. Making critical business information backups via third-party makes it vulnerable and increases security risks, whereas size limitation, availability of bandwidth, and data retrieval capability is an additional issue.
If making backups at cloud services is inexpensive, it’s insecure too. If you had been given an option to sort out a disaster recovery plan for a company like Help at Home, what would be your main consideration points and how will you arrive at a decision? Comments appreciated.
Thanks
Deepak
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