November 20169 part of automated as well as process-driven recovery scenarios.Smarter Business ­Six Ways for Organisations to Be DR Ready 1. Advanced Replication: Ensuring the simulated use of replicated backup files and data between the source and target hosts to perform recovery testing of services across onsite and offsite data centre infrastructures.2. Optimised Network Acceleration: Offsite rep-lication would help manage the recovery of critical work-loads in case of a primary data centre outage. However, in order to make it effective, regular repetitive simulation is required.3. Verified Recoverability: The single most important factor in any simulation of DR scenario testing is making sure the underlying technology has the capability of automating and validating the integrity and recoverability of the applications, data and resources it is backing up and replicating. Automated verification of every replica with scripted tests against applications means that recovery scenarios are tested both consistently and automatically as part of operations. This can deliver significant cost savings.4. Automated Failover Or-chestration: Effective sim-ulation of DR scenarios also have built-in failover orches-tration to offer easy one-click site failover invocation test-ing of entire services, appli-cations, workloads or virtual machines. The ability to cre-ate predetermined failover plans for groups of resources ensures all required failover and failback scenarios simpli-fy data centre migrations and planned DR testing. Planned/simulated failover will move resources from the production site to the disaster recovery site. Migration or mainte-nance operations can also run with minimal impact on its users and without any data loss. Policy-based failover can synchronise all changes and also encompass failback to the primary data centre scenarios can be covered as part of simulations. This ca-pability allows a business to initiate a saved failover plan with one click. What's more, with such automation and or-chestration, DR plans can be simulated remotely.5. Planned Failover and Failback Simulations: Failover and failback scenarios simplify data centre migrations and planned DR testing. Planned/simulated failover will move resources from the production site to the disaster recovery site. Migration or maintenance operations can also run with minimal impact on its users and without any data loss. Policy-based failover can synchronise all changes and also encompass failback to the primary data centre.6. Cloud Based DR Capability: Being able to simulate the recoverability of services, data and applications into various cloud based environments is now also a key requirement for effective DR scenario testing. Simulations that can test and ensure availability of mission-critical applications with fully integrated, fast and secure cloud-based DR are critical. This caters for customers who do not have a secondary data centre facility, but would rather employ cloud-based services to provide DR. Instead of building and maintaining a second facility for disaster recovery, a customer can simply use any cloud-based environment. Today, when companies across the globe need to be `Always-On' 24x7x365, any form of downtime comes at a substantial cost. Every minute down translates into lost sales and an impact on reputation, especially if the company is engaged with customers online. In the age of round-the-clock customer service, customers' expectations run high. It is inevitable for businesses that are available online to be always present, contactable and function optimally, even when disaster strikes. That's why DR has become an integral component of business planning and plays a critical part in ensuring optimal business continuity. Nathan Steiner
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