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Recovery of any sort - regardless of whether it is a system or a specific data set - begins with determining the value of data and having access to it. While developing and testing such a strategy does come with challenges in terms of resource, know-how and budget, it is the answering of these questions that forms the basis of the plan and often leads to another question: is it a business continuity requirement or disaster recovery?

DISASTER RECOVERY VERSUS BUSINESS CONTINUITY
The two concepts are similar in their outcome but are achieved quite differently. However, if something is absolutely critical to the business, then defining an effective strategy is crucial.

Generally, there is little risk of something catastrophic happening, as modern IT is, on the whole, extremely reliable. Even so, this small risk must be considered and could be affected by a number of factors beyond the system itself, including network connectivity. Having ultra-high availability statistics for a data centre server becomes irrelevant when users cannot connect while you are in your DR position. As a result, continuity or recovery must be considered as a whole, based on the effect an issue could have on the business, rather than on the individual business system. This should include the actual user data, be it a public or internal user, or another system.

If you are trying to achieve a system with no point of failure, then there needs to be no point of failure in the whole process and not just in areas identified as at direct risk.

THE ROLE OF THE DATA CENTRE PROVIDER
In the age of cloud and data centre hosting, service providers build a lot of disaster recovery functionality into the services they offer; from redundancy of power and network connectivity, to having multiple data centres. They do it on a large scale so it is cost-effective. This has inherent benefits for organisations, not least of which are cost savings. Data centre operators have the skills, technology resources and infrastructure to deal with both disaster recovery and business continuity types of requirement and, as a result, it could be more beneficial for an organisation to rely on such a vendor as part of their strategy. According to a Forrester report entitled, "The State of IT Resiliency and Preparedness", 42 per cent of organisations use an outsourced disaster recovery service of some kind.

Service providers therefore must be able to accommodate the specifics of a business' IT estate, as opposed to offering an out of the box style service.

SECURITY
Security is a commonly missed consideration when developing a disaster recovery plan. Issues such as data breaches, hackers or data loss can have an equally devastating effect on a business as a network failure, for example. For small and medium sized enterprises that don't have dedicated security teams, breaches are often difficult to detect in the first place. As a result, hosting data with a third party, for example a data centre provider, is often more effective as these smaller organisations are able to benefit from the expertise, resources and technologies of these operators.

CONCLUSION
In a perfect world an organisation would have two data centres, platforms, networks, and data replication with all aspects fully resilient. This of course requires a colossal investment that is not realistic for many. Data centre providers, however, encompass these aspects as part of their business model. Everything that they do to protect their own business can be of benefit to their customers. Disaster recovery is therefore not something that a business needs to face alone. Working with a trusted provider can be a cost-effective and efficient way of delivering a comprehensive strategy.