US Want Options for Disaster Recovery? SharePoint 2016 Has You Covered

SOLUTION BRIEF

Want Options for Disaster Recovery?

SharePoint 2016 Has You Covered On aggregate, North American businesses lose approximately

$700 BILLION annually due to server, application, and network downtime. These outages cost mid-sized businesses approximately $1 million each year, an IHS study found.1 The cost of downtime is undeniable, so much so that even 99% availability isn’t enough for many businesses.

Put that into perspective.

A Microsoft blog pointed out that:

99%

uptime equates to 3 days and 15 hours² of downtime in a year.

99.9%

and that number drops to just 8 hours and 45 minutes.

99.999%

allows for just 5 minutes and 15 seconds in an entire year.

This accounts for planned and unplanned outage, and organizations that want to control costs can use SharePoint 2016 to gain an edge.

SharePoint 2016 and High Availability Actual availability requirements will vary a great deal from one business environment to another. For some organizations, a small amount of planned downtime, mostly during low-usage times such as the middle of the night, isn’t a problem at all. There are plenty of businesses that don’t need to worry about their availability percentage but instead need only focus on minimizing unplanned outages, but that is the trouble.

System or process failures can lead to major unplanned outage issues, a Microsoft blog explained, and organizations must not only consider downtime events but also assess how performance degradation impacts operations. For example, a partial outage that bottlenecks the network and creates latency can be annoying for end users because it slows performance.

That same partial outage opens up regulatory problems if issues limit access to systems storing medical data and makes that information inaccessible when a patient needs it.

Availability requirements are extremely specific to each business, and SharePoint 2016 has been designed to give organizations plenty of options. Companies can customize configurations and recovery objectives to optimize operations around recovery time and point objectives. The system brings together recovery time and recovery point goals and places that information alongside projects’ downtime costs to help users quickly identify the costs associated with availability disruptions and make decisions accordingly.

Continued on next page

1-800-843-8733 • LearningTree.com/SharePoint

SOLUTION BRIEF: Want Options for Disaster Recovery? SharePoint 2016 Has You Covered (continued)

Preventing Data Loss with one another, with systems of both types spread over multiple environments can improve service availability, but puts less emphasis on maintaining up-to-date information at all times.

Flexibility is a central component of SharePoint 2016, something that is evident in backup workflows that can be fine-tuned to meet extremely specific business demands. For example, a Microsoft blog article pointed out that companies can:

Recovering From Disasters

• Leverage full or differential backups³ based on their recovery requirements.

• Customize settings for web application backup configurations.

• Differentiate in how the system handles non-shared services, proxy systems for non-shared service applications and shared services, providing a layer of precision within backup environments.

Options of this sort abound, ranging from configurationonly backup capabilities to site collection backup setups. These nuanced, highly customizable functions are invaluable as businesses face a wide range of data protection demands, particularly when it comes to preventing both data and service loss.

In many instances, lost data will impact end-user productivity. However, it is possible for lost data to still leave businesses with regulatory fines depending on the type of information that is lost. Backup strategies that focus on duplicating data across the network can prevent information from being permanently lost.

Running live and backup configurations in conjunction

Ensuring data and service availability and preventing loss is essential, but organizations must also be ready for worst-case scenarios in which a disaster forces them to think outside the box. According to Microsoft, SharePoint is designed to streamline recovery after a failover event. Using SharePoint 2016 for disaster recovery can enable organizations to minimize or prevent downtime4 by quickly recovering access to applications. This is possible by configuring SharePoint Server for disaster recovery in the first place (a process that leans heavily on the Access Services service application), establishing policies for system recovery after the initial failover, configuring central administration functions, domain URLs, and similar Access Services.

Organizations must perform a careful balancing act as they work to maintain high levels of availability, prevent service or data loss, and streamline disaster recovery.

SharePoint 2016 is built to give users flexibility to fine-tune processes around their specific demands, making expert-level knowledge of the database configuration essential.

US1701 SPDisasterRecovery

Learning Tree can help. Our courses on SharePoint and data protection can give IT teams the tools they need to stay ahead of emergency situations and limit risk.

Sources: 1 http://news.ihsmarkit.com/press-release/technology/businesses-losing-700-billion-year-it-downtime-says-ihs 2 https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj715263(v=office.16).aspx 3 https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee663490(v=office.16).aspx 4 https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt790695(v=office.16).aspx

1-800-843-8733 • LearningTree.com/SharePoint