Staffing & Recruitment
Dual Data Centre Hosting And Disaster Recovery For A National Staffing Agency
Scout Outsource migrated a national staffing agency's business-critical systems out of a single server room into two geographically separate colocation facilities, with replication between sites, documented runbooks and scheduled failover testing.
The challenge
Business-critical systems ran from a single server room with no tested recovery path. A site-level incident would have stopped placements nationally.
What we did
Workloads were migrated into two geographically separate colocation facilities with replication between them, documented runbooks and scheduled failover testing.
Outcomes
- Production and recovery split across two facilities
- Replication with documented, rehearsed failover
- Recovery objectives defined, measured and met in testing
Common questions
How far apart should two data centres be?
Far enough that one flood, fire, power event or regional network fault cannot affect both, but close enough that the latency between them supports your replication method. Synchronous replication typically needs sites within tens of kilometres; asynchronous replication removes that constraint in exchange for a small recovery point window.
What is the difference between a backup and a disaster recovery plan?
A backup is a copy of your data. A disaster recovery plan is a tested process for running the business from somewhere else: the infrastructure to run on, the order systems come up in, who does what, and how long it takes. Most organisations have the first and assume it gives them the second.
How often should disaster recovery failover be tested?
At least annually, and after any material change to the environment. An untested recovery plan is a document rather than a capability: the failures that surface in testing are almost always missing dependencies, expired credentials and undocumented manual steps, none of which appear on paper.
Next step
Tell us what solution you're looking for.
We'll scope it, quote it, and say plainly if a smaller piece of work would solve the problem instead.