So You Want to Build Your Own Internal Data Center Recovery Site
A number of our clients have embarked on the development of an internal data center recovery site to backup their primary computing facility. This trend is continuing to increase as today’s technology makes it easier to clients of all sizes to consider an internal data center recovery site. In considering an internal data center recovery site, we ask clients to consider a number of items in order to determine if they are ready to embark on this journey:
- Do you accurately know what systems and applications are critical to your organization today? Tomorrow?
- Is your IT organization and staff at a level of maturity it can support multiple data centers?
- Do you have mature change managment, incident management and problem management processes to address multiple data centers?
- Is your network robust enough to support the requirements of multiple data centers as well as supporting the entire company should the backup data center be activated?
- Do you have a capacity planning process that can accurately forecast growth of your data centers over time? How long will your backup data center need to support the company?
- What is your approach to virtualization? How will it be used?
- Do you want to build your own backup data center or use colocation facilities to reduce your initial outlay?
- What recovery strategies will be used for tier of system and application criticality?
- Do you understand the short and long term financial requirements of a facility of this nature?
- Are your systems and applications capable of supporting data replication, active/passive, etc.?
It is critical that IT personnel consider these items as well as others in determining if a backup data center meets the needs of the business.
About MHA: MHA Consulting is a leading boutique Business Continuity Planning, Disaster Recovery and IT Optimization consulting services firm for Fortune 1000 companies. Visit our website at www.mha-it.com or contact Michael Herrera at [email protected].
Michael Herrera
Michael Herrera is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of MHA. In his role, Michael provides global leadership to the entire set of industry practices and horizontal capabilities within MHA. Under his leadership, MHA has become a leading provider of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery services to organizations on a global level. He is also the founder of BCMMETRICS, a leading cloud based tool designed to assess business continuity compliance and residual risk. Michael is a well-known and sought after speaker on Business Continuity issues at local and national contingency planner chapter meetings and conferences. Prior to founding MHA, he was a Regional VP for Bank of America, where he was responsible for Business Continuity across the southwest region.
