Disaster Recovery (DR) allows an organization to maintain or quickly resume mission-critical functions following a disaster. At a DR site, an organization can recover and restore its technology infrastructure and operations when its primary data center is unavailable. Examples of disaster include but are not limited to fire, theft/vandalism, loss or corruption of critical application (s), cyber attack, environmental hazards e.g flooding, power problems, cooling failure etc.

Setting up a DR site is normally part of the Business Continuity Plan of an organization. External auditors, internal auditors, and information systems auditors often want to check that you institution has an operational DR site for risk mitigation. Insurance underwriters also want to know if you have an operational DR site, it could lower your premiums. The business risks are not only due to a cybersecurity attack but could be due to fire, flooding, rogue employees, and data center equipment failure.

KENET has operational data centers with community cloud infrastructure at USIU, UoN and CUEA that could be used for setting up disaster recovery sites for members. However, it is possible for a member institution to setup their DR sites at other locations outside the KENET network but that would attract higher communications costs between the primary site at your campus and the off-site DR site. Note that there is no need for a disaster recovery site that you cannot access at high speed in the event of a disaster (including restoration from the off-site backup site).

The actual cost depends on the requirements of a particular institution. KENET engineers are available to discuss the requirements and the associated costs and to support your ICT team with implementation of the DR site. The costs on Table 1 are competitive with Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure costs but also attract much lower communication costs between the main campus and the DR site (data centers are outside Africa). We have excluded the dedicated link costs in Table 1 because it depends on the location of the main campus or headquarters of the member institution. For example, the communication costs are very low for campuses on last mile KENET fiber or Liquid Telecom fiber.

Table 1: Indicative recurrent costs for different DR options

The goal of KENET is to support the implementation of your Business Continue Plan at affordable recurrent and non-recurrent costs.