While many companies, large and small, believe they will never be struck by a disaster of any kind, analysts have come up with facts to the contrary. As a matter of fact, 40% of all businesses (big and small) that experience a disaster, go out of business within five years of that event.

Disasters can be caused by computer viruses, security breaches, software issues, hardware failures, data corruption and power interruptions, among others. Floods, fires and sabotage are not the norm, but the possibility of these types of disasters should also be considered. A fool-proof contingency plan is vital for any company, no matter how small.

Disaster Recovery (DR) is a coordinated activity to facilitated the recovery of business systems. This can be achieved by restoring IT or business operations at an alternate location, or using alternate equipment, or switching to manual processes if needs be.

A Superior Disaster Recovery Facility

Document Bank Botswana’s DR facility includes all services necessary for the smooth running of our clients’ business operations, including server side-systems, office space, desktop computers and telephony.  Twenty-four hour access control means that only authorised personnel are allowed into the DR site.  Our facility is fire-proof, climate-controlled, has raised flooring to safeguard against flooding, uninterruptible power supply and generator back-up. Quite honestly, a company’s safest bet when it comes to contingency planning, is offsite storage with Document Bank Botswana.

Our Disaster Recovery Services in Detail

Hosted Back-up

This service entails back-ups being performed on a weekly basis from the back-up media to an external, on-site hard drive. It includes restoration tests. The external hard drive is then taken to the secure facility at Document Bank and the data restored onto the hosted backup server.

In the event of a failure, the data will be restored from the hosted backup server to your server from an external hard drive. You don’t require any hardware for this service.

This option involves remote back-up software sending the back-up to the hosted back-up server situated at Document Bank via the Internet, regular telephone lines, or other network connections. It does this at night while servers and data networks are not being used. Back-ups can also be done on-demand at any time. This is a fully automated option. 

In the event of a failure, the data will be restored from the hosted back-up server to your server.  You don’t require any additional hardware for this option.

Hosted Mirror Server

This service provides an identical mirror image of your server to a virtual server hosted by Document Bank. In the event of a server failure, the server will be transported to your site within two hours, ensuring minimum service disruption.

Back-ups are restored on a daily basis to an external hard drive on-site. The external hard drive is then taken to our secure facility at Document Bank and the data is restored onto a server that you own.

Hosted Online Mirror Server

This is an online service that provides an identical mirror image of your server to a virtual server hosted on one of our physical servers.

The mirror server and the mirror client maintain exact copies of the important directories of your server at the location. Whenever files are added, updated, or deleted on your server, those changes are reflected on the mirror server. The mirror service can mirror multiple drives and data root folders.

The mirror server software runs on your server; the mirror client software runs on the remote computer. You can schedule the mirror client software to launch weekly, daily, hourly or even more frequently.  It can be scheduled to launch during off-peak hours to make the most efficient use of available bandwidth.

The result is an exact duplicate of your server, ready to be put into service if needed, or ready for you to copy files back to your server.

Online Mirror Server

This service has the same features as the hosted online mirror service, with the difference that you also supply the mirror server, which is housed in the server rack at Document Bank. This is a high-availability solution guaranteeing minimum downtime for critical services.

How you benefit

• Secure off-site storage means that YOU save on creating this secure storage on your own premises
• If YOUR premises are struck by disaster, you have a fool-proof back-up plan at your disposal
• Even if disaster makes the running of your business UNUSUAL, you can carry on conducting your business AS USUAL