Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 66 | Page 48

FEATURE : DISASTER RECOVERY
Gregg Petersen , Regional Director – MEA , Cohesity
and capabilities . Second , you will need to carefully consider what aspects of your IT infrastructure are most crucial to keep running during a disaster . And finally , it ’ s important to identify any external factors that may have an impact on your DR plans ,” he said . “ Whether it ’ s internal politics or outside regulations , being aware of these factors will help ensure that your DR plan is able to meet the needs of your organisation under any circumstances . Ultimately , developing a comprehensive DR plan requires foresight , flexibility , and above all , attention to detail . So , if you ’ re looking for ways to build the best DR plan possible , just follow those simple tips !”

THE BEST WAY FOR A CIO TO ENSURE PREPAREDNESS IS TO REMAIN PROACTIVE , CONSTANTLY MONITORING FOR POTENTIAL RISKS AND BUILDING ROBUST CONTINGENCY PLANS FOR EACH ONE .

How should CIOs and their IT teams go about building their Disaster Recovery plan ? According to Petersen , traditional Disaster Recovery implementations use a duplicate and mirroring approach and offer the advantage of near-zero downtime and fast recovery times that cannot be achieved with backup alone . However , said Petersen , the downside is that this approach requires an expensive secondary location , and entails the risk that malware could propagate and replicate because of near-sync replication . “ CIOs should therefore consider the modern alternative – Asa-Service-based Disaster Recovery which enables them to use public cloud as their secondary infrastructure .
“ With ransomware being one of the primary threat vectors , it ’ s also critical for a robust DR plan to also include backup – which can also be delivered Asa-Service . While DR solutions create separation by replicating data offsite , the near real-time nature of replication means infected or encrypted data may also get propagated as well . However , modern next gen data management solutions also provide immutability which means the backup data cannot be deleted or altered and this is critical in protecting an organisation ’ s data against ransomware ,” he said . p
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