What is Redundancy?

WHAT IS IT?

Redundancy is the concept of storing content and having access availability from more than one location. Redundancy is starting point for any business continuity plan designed to address the needs of any mission critical systems. In terms of Document Management systems that support any mission critical activities, the accessibility of your documents, and systems that support them is imperative to the success of your organization. Also, control over your data and information is crucial and must be protected from disasters. Through storing a real time copy of all of your documents and data in a separate secure location you never run the risk of lost or unavailable access to them at any time. Data Redundancy provides recovery and backup of all of your important documents.

REDUNDANCY CHECKLIST

When exploring redundancy options with vendors the following questions should be addressed to make sure that their offering meets your recovery needs:

• Are my documents as secure at the secondary site as they are in the primary?
• What is the process for failover to the secondary site?
• What is the synchronizing frequency between the two sites?
• What testing is done to insure that all the documents and data are mirrored at the secondary site?
• What level of performance degradation should you expect when operating from the secondary site?
• Are they running the same level of infrastructure at the secondary site?
• How long does it take to switch to the secondary site in the event that the primary becomes unavailable?
• How frequently are the failover processes tested?
• Do they provide a Service Level Agreement on the service?
• Do they perform SAS70 audits on both sites and the failover process?
• How much does the service cost?
• Are there other levels of service that cost less that might meet your needs?

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

“Time is Money” When your systems fail you lose both time and money not only trying to recover all of your information and documents but the cost of interruption associated with these events. With an implemented redundancy strategy all of your documents and data are backed up and the secondary systems wait idling ready to be called into service.

When your primary system fails, your backup will automatically start uninterrupted from secondary data center. Your documents and data, which potentially could be lost due to a system failure, will be recovered from the secondary datacenter. With redundancy you mitigate the exposure and cost that lost or unavailable access to you Document Management system might cause.