It’s a scenario you’d rather not dwell on: your most important IT systems are down. What is the impact on the organization? How do you get systems up and running again quickly? Are the backups up to date? Questions that could keep you awake at night as an IT manager. After all, an interruption in the systems usually leads to stagnation in business operations, resulting in high costs, the inability to meet service levels, and perhaps also damage to your image.

It can take hours/days or sometimes weeks to get data and applications operational again from backups. This can cause problems with customer service and put a dent in the image when the organization cannot function. Is that acceptable? If the answer is no then it is necessary to work out a recovery scenario. It is an “insurance policy” against the failure of business-critical systems. Just like insurance against e.g. fire, a so-called Disaster Recovery Service is essential to complement a backup system in order to return to a working situation.

The Universal DRS includes a set of recovery initiatives designed to ensure that critical business functions continue to function despite serious incidents, or are restored to an operational state within a specified period of time.