Disaster Recovery involves much more than a secondary site to house backup servers.  It begins with awareness and planning to start to define two key time based values: Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).  These values determine the roadmap that the planner will create, which will define the disaster recovery plan.  At GCA Technology Services, we take the time to understand the different value requirements and budgetary constraints that weigh in.  Our familiarity with various products and brands allows us to carve a plan that fits your unique circumstances.

The RTO and RPO concepts belong to a methodology around a set of concepts and techniques for managing information technology (IT) infrastructure, development, and operations. These concepts are referred to as Information Technology Infrastructure Library or ITIL. GCA is fully trained in the ITIL practice (as well as a training provider for ITIL) and employs their use in Disaster Recovery planning.

GCA’s disaster recovery solutions can involve any or all of the following components:

• Determining RTO and RPO
• Producing a plan using best practices
• Supplying the hardware and software products needed
• Implementation of the hardware and software
• Testing the plan
• Execution at the time of the event

These services are provided through virtualization, advanced storage, and replication services.

To begin formulating a disaster recovery plan, we rank the key business areas to further define the RTO and RPO figures and a risk assessment. Part of the risk assessment process is to review the types of potentially disruptive events that can affect the normal running of the organization.

Disasters can be caused by many different events:

Environmental

• Tornado
• Hurricane
• Flood
• Snowstorm
• Drought
• Earthquake
• Electrical storms
• Fire
• Subsidence and Landslides
• Freezing Conditions
• Contamination and Environmental Hazards
• Epidemics

GCA has on staff professional disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) planning consultants with experience in educating and assisting their customers with all aspects of DR/BC planning, implementation and ongoing support. Systems impact and risk assessments, alternate facility and recovery strategy recommendations, hardware and software technology evaluation, and training are our key areas of expertise.

The key to a successful disaster recovery plan is the leveraging of key hardware and software technologies. GCA has partnered with industry leading technology partners to provide products to enable these advanced capabilities.

Storage

• Data replication
• Data De-Duplication
• Off-site backups
• VTL or Virtual Tape Libraries
• WORM and ILM technologies

Servers

• Virtualization 
• Server Consolidation
• LDOMS, Containers/Zones, Domains
• Blade Technology
• RedShifting / Greening

Networking

• WAFS and WAN optimization
• Hot standby networks

Security

• Tape Encryption
• wire speed data path encryption
• firewalls and WAN security

Infrastructure

• Power and cooling
• Enclosures and racks
• Employee workspace
• NOC Network Operation Center

Unfortunately, one can never predict when catastrophic events will occur. All we can do is to hope for the best but prepare for the worst.  In recent years, entire companies have vanished due to cataclysmic events such as hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, flooding, and terrorist attacks. Corporate data can also be lost due to weak network security; hackers can cause just as much damage as environmental disasters. However under catastrophic conditions, circumstances are different. The physical office building may not exist for you to conduct your business. Access to servers and corporate networks may not be available for several days or weeks. This is where disaster recovery and business continuity services differ from merely restoring data from tape to working servers.

Make disaster recovery plans an integrated part of your business. GCA has a wide range of services that can accommodate your RTO/RPO objectives and lower the cost of the labor-intensive processes of developing a disaster recovery plan, while ensuring security-enhanced backup, retrieval and archive capability.

Contact Us with your questions, we are ready to help.