Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery Solutions with Open-E JovianDSS

Imagine the life of a company or an organization with all its commercial and operational activities. In order to safeguard all the aspects of the business, it is essential to ensure data availability and its security. However, nobody can predict unfortunate events, such as fire, a ransomware attack, or a natural disaster that can cause a tragic data loss. It appears to be the exact moment when a business continuity plan comes to the rescue.

What is Business Continuity?

Business continuity is a plan in the risk management aspect, which helps you understand how the essential organizational functions should be controlled or recovered no matter what happens. Such a plan gives you a complete picture of any emergency that can occur so you could prepare your company to operate at least on a basic level during potential disruptions.

There are three core strategic elements (3R) in each business continuity plan:

• Resilience
• Response
• Recovery

Resilience focuses on identifying vulnerabilities in your business systems and taking preventive measures to mitigate risks before disasters occur. This stage involves analyzing the organization’s environment and determining the best backup solutions—whether local or remote.

Response outlines the specific actions departments should take during an emergency or disruption. This strategy also includes guidelines for handling scheduled maintenance of IT infrastructure, ensuring minimal operational impact.

Recovery is the blueprint for returning to full operational capacity after an unexpected event. Depending on the business size and scope, recovery strategies may involve backup infrastructure, external service providers, or leveraging internal resources to restore normalcy.

Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery?

Some people believe that business continuity equates to disaster recovery. In fact, disaster recovery is supposed to be considered a subset of business continuity, covering the whole IT infrastructure. In simple words, a Business Continuity plan should cover all the aspects of both regular maintenance and disaster recovery, to protect the business against disruptions.   Moreover, a disaster recovery plan is not only being formed by emergency procedures but also contain distinctive components:

• Critical IT assets.
• Specific tools and technologies used for the recovery.
• A disaster recovery team.
• External recovery service providers (e.g., data recovery companies).

In today’s strongly digitalized world, the Business Continuity strategy is firmly focused on protecting and recovering data. Therefore, to support the business continuity plan, you need to consider the use of a secure data storage solution.

The Role of Data Storage Solutions in Business Continuity

Regardless of the type of business, most modern organizations produce and work with a large amount of any kind of data, which must be maintained appropriately. That is why the acquisition of a proven data storage solution should sound to you like a good plan. For example, the Open-E JovianDSS storage solution supports such functionalities as self-healing, check-summing, atomic transactions, and more, which can significantly improve the safety of the whole system. The system’s self-healing will automatically compare the data you work with by calculating checksums with the ones located on the metadata and, if any damages are detected, remediate the corrupted data without anyone’s intervention.

The next aspect to be specified about data protection in the business continuity strategy is that it can be used not only in disaster situations but also for scheduled events as updates or hardware maintenance. So, if you plan to update the system or struggle with a damaged disk, the failover cluster functionality of the data storage solution can assist you. The task of this function is to seamlessly redirect the data flow from this system to the backup one, which mimics the operating system environment. 

Disaster Recovery with Open-E JovianDSS

In the event of a disaster, Open-E JovianDSS provides multiple recovery options:

• Snapshot Recovery

In the case of a ransomware attack, even if the production server is encrypted, snapshots (which are read-only) remain accessible for data recovery.

• High Availability Cluster

If hardware failure occurs, the secondary node in a high-availability cluster takes over from the primary node, minimizing downtime.

• On- & Off-Site Data Protection

Data can be instantly accessed or restored from a local or remote backup, ensuring business continuity even when the primary server is compromised.

The Cost of Data Loss

The usage of data storage solutions can prevent tragic losses on salaries and revenues, which can appear due to data unavailability. These losses can be calculated in such way:

Losses on salaries:

• An empty-handed employee still must be paid,
• Each hour paid when there’s no access to the data and no work can be done is a loss.

Losses on revenue:

• When there’s no data available and the company cannot operate – there are no revenues generated during that time.
• By taking total yearly revenue, you can average how much money the company generates through sales each hour.
• Each hour without access to the data and work that can be done is a loss (lost opportunity).
• If you are a web service provider, the data unavailability may lead to penalties.

How Open-E JovianDSS Enhances Your Business Continuity Strategy

With Open-E JovianDSS, businesses can improve their Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans by leveraging:

• Zettabyte File System (ZFS) for data integrity and reliability
• Failover cluster functionality for seamless data protection during hardware failures or maintenance
• On- & Off-Site Data Protection for instant access to backups during disasters

By incorporating these features into your business continuity plan, you can effectively safeguard your company against unexpected events and operational downtimes. With Open-E JovianDSS, you are not only protecting your data but also ensuring the resilience, response, and recovery of your entire business.