Logicalis US White Paper Explores Advanced Technologies in Disaster Recovery Planning

NEW YORK, Oct. 1, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- In today's online, always-on economy, if a company's IT systems are down, the enterprise is offline – but its competitors aren't.  Logicalis US, an international IT solutions and managed services provider (www.us.logicalis.com), stresses the importance of a solid disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) plan, and has created an informative – and easy to read – white paper to help businesses sort through the maze of DR/BC options.

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(Download "Advanced Technologies Make Thinking about Disaster Recovery a Lot Less Scary: Why You Should Reevaluate Your DR Strategy Today" here:  http://www.ict-log.us/pdPGR.)

"As we're fond of saying at Logicalis, hope is not a strategy," says David Kinlaw, Practice Manager, Protection Services, for Logicalis US.  "Too many IT pros go home every night hoping that their organization won't experience a disaster that will leave them scrambling to get their IT systems back online in a hurry.  The fact is, disaster recovery and business continuity solutions require both a strategy and a financial commitment because not thinking about a disaster won't stop it from happening.  Today, with the myriad of technological solutions available, there is a combination of virtualization, replication, co-location, data-center-as-a-service, DRaaS, or cloud-to-cloud technologies that will suit nearly every enterprise organization, making a data protection strategy not only prudent, but a no brainer.  It's no longer a question of whether or not to implement a DR solution, but what form that solution should take."

Tape backup has traditionally been a solid option for disaster recovery – in fact, according to analyst reports, approximately 75 percent of the world's data is still protected by copying it to magnetic tape and shipping it off to some secure offsite location for storage.  But in terms of the time and effort it takes to retrieve data – the recovery point objective (RPO) – and reunite it with the systems that are required to do anything with it – the recovery time objective (RTO), tape may be cost effective, but it may not be the most efficient option available.  By the time data is restored from tapes, that data may be hours, days or weeks old, something that is acceptable in some business scenarios, but a death sentence in others.

When continuous uptime is the most critical decision-making factor, the cloud provides a variety of DR options, ranging from do-it-yourself DR in the cloud to DR-as-a-Service and cloud-to-cloud DR options, each requiring numerous decision points all based on the business' specific RPO/RTO needs.  No matter which cloud option a business considers, there are a host of critical "must-haves" that no DRaaS solution should be without.

Eight DRaaS Must-Haves

1. A multi-tenancy cloud environment in a Tier 1 data center
2. Geographic diversity and data center redundancy
3. A security framework based on industry best practices, i.e., HIPAA, PCI DSS, FISMA, ITAR and MASS LAW compliance
4. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with true financial penalties
5. Dedicated disaster recovery delivery managers
6. Guaranteed reservations for additional capacity required in the event of a disaster
7. Monitoring and management based on ITIL best practices
8. Quarterly review and an annual full recovery test

Want to Learn More?

• Download a copy of Logicalis' white paper, "Advanced Technologies Make Thinking about Disaster Recovery a Lot Less Scary: Why You Should Reevaluate Your DR Strategy Today."
  (http://www.ict-log.us/pdPGR)
• Read "What Sandy Teaches Us about Disaster Recovery."
  (http://www.ict-log.us/pdPL4)
• Explore Logicalis' BC/DR microsite.
  (http://www.ict-log.us/pdPMM)

About Logicalis

Logicalis is an international IT solutions and managed services provider with a breadth of knowledge and expertise in communications and collaboration; data center and cloud services; and managed services.

Logicalis employs nearly 3,500 people worldwide, including highly trained service specialists who design, specify, deploy and manage complex ICT infrastructures to meet the needs of almost 6,000 corporate and public sector customers.  To achieve this, Logicalis maintains strong partnerships with technology leaders such as Cisco, HP, IBM, CA Technologies, EMC, NetApp, Microsoft, VMware and ServiceNow.

The Logicalis Group has annualized revenues of over $1.4 billion from operations in Europe, North America, South America and Asia Pacific and is fast establishing itself as one of the leading IT and Communications solution integrators specializing in the areas of advanced technologies and services.

The Logicalis Group is a division of Datatec Limited, listed on the Johannesburg and London AIM Stock Exchanges, with revenues of over $5 billion.

For more information, visit www.us.logicalis.com.

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Media contacts:
Lisa Dreher, VP, Marketing & Business Development,
Logicalis US
[email protected]
425-201-8111
www.us.logicalis.com

Karen Franse, Communication Strategy Group for Logicalis US
[email protected]
866-997-2424
www.gocsg.com

SOURCE Logicalis