Data loss - a topic that could not be more relevant. Data loss is one of the biggest business risks in times of digitalization. Not only does it result in high costs, time expenditure and annoyance, but the damage to a company's image is also immense.
Every company works with large data sets on a daily basis, be it for triggering production chains, sending order confirmations or following up on existing contracts.
Data loss causes more than 100 billion euros in damage to German companies every year. The reasons for this are varied, so not only human causes or technical problems, but also "force majeure" in the form of natural disasters can be reasons for data loss.
Some of these sources of risk are difficult or impossible to control. Also, a combination of the above reasons for data loss often occurs.
Despite the awareness of these issues and the possible causes, there are still some cases this year (2022) in which companies are affected by data loss. Some companies are even driven to the point of insolvency by such a loss.
This was the case for a company in the furniture and kitchen industry. Due to a regional power failure, the IT servers were severely damaged and an irreparable loss of data occurred. At the same time, the emergency power supply failed due to a technical defect.
Due to the outage and the associated loss of data, the company is unable to process existing orders. It is also currently not possible to accept new orders. The data could not be restored despite intensive checks by the IT department and external specialist companies.
Due to the unavoidable loss of sales and the resulting inability to pay, insolvency proceedings had to be opened. (Source 1 and Source 2)
Nothing works anymore. All data is lost. But what "Plan B" with measures against data loss is there?
Being prepared for an emergency is an absolute must. The basis for this is a complete disaster recovery plan. In this plan, a company defines various measures in order to protect itself against a worst-case scenario.
The requirements for availability and disaster recovery concepts with critical recovery time, recovery point and recovery consistency objectives can only be met with intelligent and consistent mirror concepts for database and application environments. Concepts are therefore required that enable the IT landscape to be mirrored in a comprehensive and consistent manner.
Nowadays, cloud solutions at several locations and sometimes even distributed over several continents offer opportunities to set up DR systems with foreseeable costs.
In case of a blackout, a standby system at another site or in the cloud is necessary. The second site must be far enough away from the source of the failure so that the entire infrastructure is still available. In the event of a blackout, this second site or the solution in the cloud is switched to productive as quickly as possible. In the process, the failure systems are recovered and activated. Operations can continue after a reasonable period of time.
It is important to note that it is not possible to start building up a failover system at a second site after the fact. To be prepared for such a crisis, it must be ensured in advance that such a system is available at all times. The disaster recovery concept must first be built and then tested. This is quite time-consuming and cost-intensive. In addition, you never know when such a case will occur and the failover system will have to go into operation at the alternative site.
With our solution Libelle BusinessShadow for High Availability and Disaster Recovery you can manage databases, file systems and applications and mirror them time-delayed if necessary. Your company is thus protected not only against the consequences of hardware and application errors, but also against the consequences of elemental damage, sabotage or data loss due to human error.
Our patented and dynamically adjustable time funnel temporarily stores the change logs before they are mirrored to the standby system. In the event of an error or maintenance, the switchover to this system can thus be carried out impressively quickly and without fuss using our High Availability and Disaster Recovery solution. This is how you secure your entire company with Libelle BusinessShadow!