Disaster Recovery for Education

How long can you survive without your IT system?

In our modern world a great majority of both our personal and our working lives are heavily dependent on technology. Whether this is a good or bad thing can be left to the philosophers but regardless of whether you like it or not it is a fact that we are a generation surrounded by electronic data.

Imagine for one moment going to work for the whole of next week without any computers working – daunting isn’t it! No access to email, all of your files and data are inaccessible and quite possibly your contact details are unavailable meaning you can’t even call anyone to tell them you are delayed by an IT issue!

Of course, each scenario is different but the above example is a real possibility and in such a case the answer to the question at the beginning… not very long at all.

It’s unlikely to happen to us…

In the IT world the word disaster doesn’t just mean a natural disaster such as fire, flood or other types of extreme weather all of which are unlikely to happen for a large number of organisations, it also refers to many other scenarios where your computer system is unavailable for a period of time, such as –

• Power Loss – A power outage is a common IT fault. Even with UPS systems there is still the possibility of failed shutdown that can cause data loss and a corrupted operating system.
• Human Error– We are all capable of making small mistakes, but unfortunately some mistakes are large enough to have dire consequences.
• Computer Virus– Disappointingly there are individuals whose primary goal is to create problems. Their reasons why may not be understandable but the result is that new threats are created every single day.
• Software Fault– As consumers we rely on software providers to release regular updates or “patches”. However, as every machine or network in the world does not have the same configuration or software deployment there can be discrepancies which hinder rather than aid.

How can Oakford help with DR?

Oakford remote backup can provide your school with a basic disaster recovery solution by securely backing up all of your files, emails and databases each night. This provides peace of mind that you can recover your data from any disaster or failure, however the restore of the data and/or reconfiguration of new equipment for the data to reside on may take longer than you would like depending on the type of data and available resources.

For schools that need to recover quickly or even near real-time, our ProActive and Real-Time DR solutions can help.

 

ProActive Disaster Recovery Our Proactive DR solution will take daily, encrypted snapshots of your servers and store them in our UK data centres. In the event of a disaster, you can not only restore your data but all of the servers including their configuration by restoring a small number of large files. In most cases this will reduce the total downtime following a disaster by 50%.  Combined with remote backup, for the restore of individual files instead of an entire system, this will provide your school with a simple, cost effective disaster recovery solution.

Real-Time Disaster Recovery ProActive DR takes point in time snapshots of your servers each day and backs them up to our secure UK data centres. In the event of a disaster a school with ProActive DR will be able to purchase some new server hardware, configure Hyper V or VMware then restore the latest copy of the virtual server machines to the new hardware. This means a faster restore of your computer system with minimal configuration required. However in certain scenarios this will still be time that a school cannot afford. Real-Time DR does not require you to restore anything, simply invoke DR over the phone and your computer system will become live in our secure cloud facility and will be as up to date as possible (a few minutes behind the original system), enabling you to continue working at your premises if you still have an Internet connection, or from another location if required.

 

Visit the Oakford Backup website to learn more… Our Backup specialist website allows you to gain a detailed understanding and allows you to try Oakford Backup free for 30 days! Click here to visit the site now.