OUTSOURCING DISASTER RECOVERY SERVICES
Outsourcing disaster recovery is an option for organizations without resources to dedicate to DR. But outsourcing doesn't alleviate the need for planning. You still need to understand your RTO and recovery point objective (RPO), and how long you might have to operate from your DR site.
Geography also plays a role when outsourcing disaster recovery. You don't want your provider too close to you if you're worried about a natural disaster. But the location of a providers' other clients also matters. Cloud disaster recovery services often share resources to help keep costs down, but what happens if too many of their customers are located in the same area and a disaster hits? That can make availability a problem.
The Oklahoma Bar Association in Oklahoma City uses service provider CoreVault to protect its backups from problems ranging from possible tornadoes to accidental deletion of files by users.
"CoreVault provides a backup site 120 miles away and an automatic way to backup data," said the organization's director of information systems Rick Loomis. "It wasn't the cheapest way to go, but we wanted to go with a proven model at a reasonable cost. They have two sites and a facility to store the backup, to make sure not even a disaster would wipe out our backups."
The deciding factors when looking at outsourcing vs. in-house DR is the costs involved and how much time it would take to implement DR under each scenario. Large vendors such as SunGard, IBM, and Iron Mountain Inc. provide DR services, but there are also many smaller collocation providers.
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