High Availability &
Disaster Recovery

Stay Online, Stay Operational

Protect, Recover, Thrive. Keeping your business safe.

High Availability &
Disaster Recovery

Stay Online, Stay Operational

Protect, Recover, Thrive. Keeping your business safe.

Why is High Availability & Disaster Recovery
Important?

Downtime costs businesses more than just time – It impacts revenue, reputation and operations. High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) are essential for keeping your systems running 24/7, protecting critical data, and ensuring seamless business continuity, even in the face of hardware failures, cyber threats or unexpected disasters.

Watch our short video explaining High Availability in more detail

Minimising Downtime​

 

High Availability ensures that users can access services even if one or more components fail, minimising the impact of downtime.

Protecting Against Data Loss​

 

Disaster recovery ensures that critical data is backed up and can be restored in case of data loss due to hardware failure, cyber attacks or other disasters.

Maintaining Business Continuity ​

 

High availability and disaster recovery ensure that organisations can maintain business continuity even during unexpected events, minimising the impact on revenue and reputation.

Meeting Compliance Requirements​

 

Many industries and governments have regulations requiring organisations to have high availability and disaster recovery plans to protect sensitive data and services.

How is High Availability and Disaster Recovery Implemented?

High availability and disaster recovery are implemented using various technologies, tools, and techniques, depending on the organization’s needs and budget. Some of the common method include: 

Redundant hardware and
software components

This involves deploying redundant hardware and software components that can take over seamlessly in case of failure.

replication

Replication involves copying data to a secondary system or site, ensuring that data is available in case of a primary system failure.  

clustering

Clustering involves grouping multiple servers to act as a single system, ensuring high availability and load balancing.

cloud-based solutions

Cloud-based solutions provide organizations with the flexibility to scale up or down their infrastructure and services as needed, ensuring high availability and disaster recovery.

The 9's of Availability

The 9s of Availability’ help measure how reliable a system is by showing how much downtime you can expect each year. The more nines, the less downtime. View the table attached to see what each level of availability means in real terms.

Use our calculator to estimate the total downtime per year + operational costs with a estimate of loss in revenue

Availability of 9's

Downtime Cost Calculator

(£):





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Find out today how we at Open Minds can create a positive impact for your business

Government

Optimize operations and ensure business continuity for public sectors

Financial Services

Ensuring that Financial services are kept secure & automate payments

Technology

Working alongside your existing setup, our software seamlessly fits into your business without disruption

Healthcare & Lifestyle

Ensuring that Hospitals & private healthcare centres are continuously operational

manufacturing

Making sure that manufacturers can keep  a hold of personal data & orders.

Retail & Goods

Ensuring that retail stores don't experience downtime & keep customer information secure

F.A.Q.

YOU HAVE QUESTIONS. WE HAVE ANSWERS

Here are some of our most frequently asked questions regarding High Availability 

What is High Availability (HA) in the context of IT systems?

High Availability refers to systems designed to be operational and accessible for a very high percentage of the time, minimizing downtime as much as possible. This is achieved through redundancy, failover processes, and robust infrastructure design, ensuring that services and applications remain available even in the event of hardware failures, software crashes, or other disruptions.

High Availability is focused on preventing downtime and service interruptions in the first place, ensuring that systems are always running and accessible. Disaster Recovery, on the other hand, is about how quickly and effectively a business can recover from an event that has already caused downtime or data loss. While HA is about maintaining continuous operations, DR is about recovery after an incident.

Common strategies include redundant hardware, where critical components have backups ready to take over in case of failure; load balancing, to distribute workload evenly across multiple servers; clustering, where multiple servers work together to provide continued service even if one fails; and regular, proactive maintenance to prevent hardware and software issues.

While High Availability aims to ensure system uptime as close to 100% as possible, achieving absolute 100% availability is extremely challenging and costly. Most HA systems aim for “Five Nines” (99.999%) availability, which equates to about 5.26 minutes of downtime per year, but even this can be difficult and expensive to maintain.

Yes, High Availability can certainly be achieved in on-premises data centers. It involves investing in redundant hardware, implementing robust backup and recovery solutions, ensuring effective load balancing, and having a well-planned disaster recovery strategy. The key is to design the data center with redundancy and resilience in mind, eliminating single points of failure.

Downtime Cost & Savings Calculator

Downtime Cost & Savings Calculator

Availability Level Estimated Cost Potential Savings

Downtime Savings Calculator