Business Continuity

There is no reason a temporary setback should turn into a permanent failure. We will put together a comprehensive plan for your entire organisation, considering key components crucial to your recovery, and establish a formal process to be followed to restore your business continuity when a disaster occurs.

Your Disaster Recovery Plan will be a comprehensive, step-by-step process for you and your staff to follow, covering such items as contacting your local authorities and insurance carriers, re-establishing phone service, sourcing equipment, restoring data, and all essentials needed to restore your organisation’s operational capability.

The reality is … even though we are aware a disaster can happen, we presume it will happen to someone else. So, when disaster strikes, the long-term consequences are often more costly than having a backup solution plan in place. Even more so toady backups are an important part of any Business Continuity Plan

Microsoft have a shared responsibility model for backing up and protecting data in Office 365. They have the physical security, they have data storage replication and redundancy, and they protect you from natural disasters or data centre issues. They do not protect you from users deleting files, human error, malicious activity, hackers or viruses. Backing up your data is your responsibility.

Nortec work with multiple vendors who will do additional backup of your data. This usually involves backing up all incoming and outgoing mail, backing up your SharePoint and Teams data, including deleted files. These are usually charged on a per mailbox basis.

Modern backup tools will allow us to back up to a local NAS device and in addition transfer the backup to our offsite storage. There is a lot of technical wizardry that goes on to make it happen. But is it reliable and it works. In today’s environment is no longer acceptable risk wise to have your company backup located in the same place as your servers. In the tape backup days, it was still expected that you take a tape off site. 

All major backup software will now allow you to backup to offsite storage, MS Azure, AWS or a private cloud solution. Our own SPOR backup solution does this and is billed at a low monthly fee. Providers such as StorageCraft, Veeam and Datto, will not only backup your data to the cloud, but included in the subscription is the ability to boot your servers virtually in their private clouds.

Nortec’s SPOR Backup Solution takes bootable snapshots of your servers and stores them on a NAS. These snapshots have a negligible effect on your network and can be run multiple times a day. SPOR then overnight backs these images up to our data centre. Recovery from SPOR can be as simple as restoring back from your on-premises NAS.

Tape Backup isn’t dead. Tape Backup is still one of the most reliable and cheapest way to store large amounts of data especially when it is for long term retention. Its just not common. We do have some clients for a variety of reasons still running tape backups. While tapes are great for storage the ability to recover directly from the backup, and recovery of an entire data centre into the public cloud is hard to compete with.