The old adage, "It's not a matter of if, but when" can strike fear in the heart of every IT professional, especially when talking about recovering form the unexpected impact of outages. Whether the result of a natural disaster, cybercrime impact, or large-scale network outages that dreaded downtime and the security measures that need to be taken around it must be planned for.
Most organizations today have at least some type of disaster recovery (DR) plan in place. However, not every organization takes the extra step to include a disaster recovery location. A key part of a plan should also include a secondary location — a physical premise or in the cloud — that can stand by ready to get your organization back up and running quickly should the unexpected happen.
The Cost of Downtime is High: Prepare Now to Avoid It
Every minute of downtime is costly in terms of the bottom line, customer relations, employee resources, and for your organization’s reputation. Mitigating these negative outcomes comes with true disaster recovery strategies and tactics, such as that secondary location.
A DR site, also known as a backup, fallback, or secondary site, where a company can temporarily relocate and restore its critical infrastructure and operations following a security breach or natural disaster. This secondary site is a major key to your organization’s larger disaster recovery or business continuity plan.
Organizations dependent upon exchanging data to conduct business (and what company isn’t?) should ensure that the mechanisms and technology used to do so, such as secure file transfer is in place both at the primary place of business as well as at the DR site as a mirrored, non-production instance.
“When you add an additional instance of your secure file transfer solution you can test failover and recovery from another location or data center and address your business’s SLAs before disaster strikes,” said Marc Delahousse, associate director of development, Fortra. “A robust, secure file transfer in place at both locations helps you better protect your critical infrastructure, get back online and meet those recovery time objectives (RTO).”
Preparation for disaster is never fun to think about but doing so now and getting that DR site ready to step into action when needed, can provide you with the fastest recovery time and with far less drain on resources.
Multiple Instances of GoAnywhere MFT Deliver Non-Stop Network Availability
With active-active deployments of GoAnywhere MFT you get the high availability you need when you are using multiple instances of the file exchange solution plus, you’ll get non-stop network availability with the solution’s load balancing feature.
Unlike some solutions with active-passive failover clusters, all the nodes in GoAnywhere are put to work in production when deployed as active-active. In brief, a DR systems architecture can be set up as:
- GoAnywhere MFT is clustered with two or more servers for high availability
- Systems are installed in the private network.
- Associated DMZ Gateways are installed in the DMZ
- No inbound ports are opened to the private network.
- The product and user files share configuration across each system/node in the cluster.
- A load balancer provides load balancing for incoming connections.
- Clustered GoAnywhere servers distribute the project workloads evenly across each node in the cluster.
If your organization does not yet have the system architecture described above, you can expect to spend more money, time and resources following a disaster than you might expect to keep your customers, employees, and trading partners in business.
Related Reading: Why You Should Cluster Your File Transfer Systems
Get YOUR Disaster Recovery Site Ready
There’s no time like today to get ready to respond and recover to a disaster that impacts your organization. A secondary site set up with robust, secure file transfer can get you back to business quickly and with minimal manual intervention.
