Specialists say one of the most important questions to consider is availability and how quickly you need to get your systems back online. The difference between getting back online in 10 minutes or three days could be millions of dollars, so you want to make sure you get just the right solution for your company, Graap said.
Around-the-clock availability will require mirroring content across two sites in real-time, Budnick said. This enables you to do an instant failover with little or no downtime, rather than force you to physically move from the office to a backup site with a stack of tapes.
Regardless of whether you outsource or set up your own site, a high availability solution is expensive.
"But if that is what it takes to keep your business from going under, it's worth every penny of it," Graap said.
An added benefit of having a high availability solution is that you can avoid maintenance downtime by working on one server while letting the other handle all traffic, Graap said. In theory, this leaves a window of risk, but most maintenance tasks, such as backups, can be cancelled if need be, he said.
One consideration for mirroring data is the bandwidth to the secondary site, Graap said. Replicating data in real-time requires enough capacity to handle it without hitches. Also, a secondary site will require the same disk space as your regular servers. You can probably get away with a smaller and cheaper system, but you still need enough storage space to match your primary servers, he said.
Whatever the choice for disaster recovery, said Budnick, it is vital that both the technology and the business departments know about the plan ahead of time.
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