What's hot in backup and DR? We ask Southern Cross

When did your company first get involved in backup and disaster recovery?

We have been providing business continuity planning, business impact assessment, disaster recovery planning and testing since 2007, but it goes back even further than that as a systems integrator of common compute and backup software platforms.

What are your backup and DR credentials?

Our consulting practice has a solid understanding of industry recognised standards such as AS/NZS 5050, ISO20000, ISO/IEC 24762, ANAO Business Continuity Management, APRA BCM, CObIT and ITIL. Our certifications include CISA, CISM, ITIL Master, and ISO27001.

Who are your main distributors for backup and DR?

Avnet, Dicker Data and Distribution Central.

Have you heard about any cool backup and DR tech recently?

Cloud is providing exciting possibilities for DR. Having DR sites in the cloud reduces the need for data centre space, IT infrastructure and IT resources, which leads to significant cost reductions, enabling smaller companies to deploy disaster recovery options that were previously only found in larger enterprises. The SaaS capabilities of these solutions also make implementation timeframes more agile in nature.

Can you tell us about a recent backup and DR project?

I wouldn't want to discuss detail of any specific backup and recovery project that we have recently completed, suffice to say one of our most recent projects leveraged the replication capability of the NetApp infrastructure to provide specific RPO (recovery point objective) and RTO (recovery point objective) requirements for a few hundred systems.

What is driving customers’ backup and DR projects?

Historically, our experience suggests DR projects have been driven by recent data loss events that have demonstrated inadequacies in an organisation’s DR strategy. These events then get greater attention of risk governance committees to migrate future risk in this area.

Backup is… ?

A necessity but only the start of the solution. For businesses to ensure they can survive data loss, they need to have a solid understanding of the different types of information they hold, how long they can operate without it, how much data they can afford to lose (ie, to what point do they need to recover the day’s data entry or processing) and last but not least, have tested processes to ensure data can be recovered to meet the required timeframes.