What are the drawbacks of outsourcing DR?
Companies that already have multiple campuses and data centers can leverage those data centers fairly readily and without great expense to provide some sort of mutual disaster recovery. I think security is a big consideration when outsourcing DR. For less than a 24-hour recovery time objective (RTO), the data needs to be on disk. So, being confident that data is secure is essential. Also, how far away is the outsourcing site? And, how would you get there after a disaster? If you envision a regional disaster, it is important to consider who is going to operate the DR environment. Will it be the service provider or will it be your own staff? And if it’s the latter, how will they get there? It’s also important to understand the length of time that you may need to be operating from your DR site. Contracts inevitably have some kind of cap on them. So, if your contract specifies six months, you need to have some kind of post-disaster recovery plan for addressing that. That issue isn’t as cri
