Back up & DR Plan- The actual cost

There is no doubt that clients are all fully aware that without a complete working back up recovering a system or server failure isn’t possible. Unfortunately, its inadvertent human error that causes most system failures.

However, the time of recovery isn’t obvious. A full back up from a removable USB hard drive if available can take up to 8hrs to transfer the data onto a new server if the existing server fails, then there is the additional time to set up the network for a system to become live again. This is called the Real Time Recovery and our objective as IT people is to reduce this time to recover, called a Real Time Objective. We do this with incremental back up software to target a Recovery Point Objective (close to the time of a failure to avoid loss of data/work). We also use virtualised environments and additional dedicated back up hardware to reduce the time to recover to potentially within an hour in the most resilient cases.

We cannot advise clients how much it costs a business to be offline for 8hrs plus during a normal trading day, the cost of employees not working, reputational risk, tills not being operational and no internet connectivity is unique to each business, but as clients it’s something you can calculate, thus this equates to the actual cost of your back up and DR plan. If you want to review this cost to bring down your real time recovery objective, call us as we have the solutions.