In a typical small business, say 15-20 employees using one server, if that server goes down it's a disaster. Time lost, sales lost, the cost of IT Consultancy to rebuild and recover data, it all adds up. At a time when remaining competitive is critical, small businesses can ill afford to be off-line
Traditionally, Disaster Recovery (or 'DR') has always been Large Enterprise territory, but not all is lost.
Whilst full site DR is beyond the budget of small businesses, you can build in a huge amount of what's called 'redundancy' into your systems, to the point where total component or service failure would become an inconvenience, instead of a total disaster.
Over the next two weeks I'll be looking into various redundancy options which are available;
- Reducing single points of failure in your server with components
- Eliminating your internet connection as a single point of failure
- Recovering from a mail server outage quickly on a low budget
- Keeping your network backbone up with redundant switches
All of these options can be implemented at low or very low cost, and you'd probably find you'd have a return on your investment in the first year. It could even save your business.
Check back at the end of the week for the first post on reducing single points of failure in your server.
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