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Server disaster recovery is the method and process dealing with preparing for recovery or a continuation of technology infrastructures that are critical to a business or organization after a human-induced or natural disaster. While business continuity involves planning for being able to keep all aspects of an organization functioning properly during the midst of disruption, server disaster recovery has a focus on technology systems that are in place to support the functions of the organization or business.

There are two main categories of disaster recovery. The first is dealing with natural disasters, such as hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes. It is very difficult to prevent or control natural disasters, although measures such as planning that includes mitigation measures may be able to help avoid loss or at least reduce them. The second category deals with human-made disasters. Among these, material spills, infrastructure failures, and bio-terrorism can be included. During these instances, mitigation planning along with surveillance can be an invaluable asset towards lessening losses in times of these events.

Because recovering your data in the event of a disaster is such a very difficult process, it can get very expensive. In a perfect world, your healthcare office would never experience any kind of disaster. Everything would work smoothly and be perfect! This is not the world we live in, so what are some better options available? There is one other option, known as virtualization.

Virtualization and server disaster recovery go hand in hand. Virtualization means that disaster recovery now is extremely easy to work and implement. It takes only copying a file to a computer and then getting the file to run. Through the virtualization of the server disaster recovery programs, many businesses have been able to reduce their server population by as much as 40%. Virtualization of disaster recovery has helped them to eliminate lots of administrative headaches.

Organizations that desire a full mirror of their primary system are able to have this without duplicating the hardware for those systems, through virtualization. Instead of having a second system, you can simply have an image of the primary system, running on a virtual machine. This can definitely have a dramatic effect on your savings. With virtualization, you can also run as many as 15 applications on a virtual environment on a single server. Just five years ago, every single application would have needed to run on a single server.

Savings also come on the storage side of server disaster recovery equation. Server disaster recovery could very well double storage costs, requiring a secondary system of hardware and software for the storage configurations. Through virtualization, your healthcare office would be allowed configurations that are varied between the DR and primate site. You’re able to have a different physical configuration at the recovery location, but you could still have the option of having the same virtual storage configuration on the physical resources. Disaster recovery could be a very great option for your healthcare business, if you live in an area that has a history of natural disasters or outages.

Although the costs could be high, your business could also benefit from disaster recovery plans, if you are dealing with highly confidential patient data. Think about what that information could be worth in the wrong hands. That’s why you should seriously consider virtualization of your server disaster recovery, so that you can save space, time, and money and enjoy peace of mind.

Tags: disaster recovery, server disaster recovery, Virtualization