Every day, there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created. That’s 2.5 followed by 17 zeroes—a lot of data—and all of it is more valuable, and more vulnerable, than ever before. As a result of these hard facts, disaster recovery needs to be part of every organization’s workflow.
Managed cloud backup services and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) offer you a sure way to get that done, so you can protect your data and your company without distracting yourself or your team from your core mission.
Your data is at risk from natural disasters including fire, flood, and earthquake, as well as the recent meteoric spike in cybercrimes such as data theft. Common events such as power outages and server errors also pose real threats to your information’s security. The generic term for all of the above—“data loss”—doesn’t convey the extent of the danger.
A breach that results in the loss of sensitive personal data can produce devastating consequences. This has always been true in the healthcare and financial services industries, but now virtually every kind of public or private enterprise must take rigorous steps to protect its information.
The immediate financial impacts of a data breach, whether they be actual hard costs or losses due to operational downtime, are really just the tip of the iceberg here. The reputational damage caused by data loss can be profound and long lasting. And it must be said that failure to adequately prepare for the kind of disaster that leaks or destroys data can lead to expensive legal action.
For all these reasons, the global DRaaS market, which was worth less than $6 billion in 2021, is projected to exceed $8 billion in 2022.
I invite you to think about business continuity and disaster recovery preparedness (BC/DR) as being mission-critical to your organization, and to correlate the availability and quality of your data with the success of your organization. It is sobering—technological resilience equals business resilience.
Disaster Recovery with the help of Cloud Backup Services
- The keystone of a solid business continuity and disaster recovery strategy is offsite storage for your backups. That’s been true for a long time and it’s still true. Cloud Backup and Recovery makes this a straightforward proposition. In the cloud, you can set up and maintain a secure and affordable multi-tenant environment to host your backups and replicate virtual machines (VMs).
- As discussed, it is prudent to keep in mind that cyberattacks, power failures and natural disasters happen with increasing frequency. Putting together a comprehensive disaster recovery plan—including redundant technologies that provide you with a secondary source of power, additional copies of data, and the failover infrastructure to minimize downtime—is necessary and, thanks to the availability of managed and cloud services, also quite doable.
Cloud-based DR services are secure, fast, flexible, and completely reliable. And in most cases, Cloud DR will save you money.
Business Continuity is the Name of the Game
In the event of a ransomware attack, to pick one significant risk factor, there are two countermeasures that must happen simultaneously. First, repel the attack. At the same time, it’s crucial that your organization remain operational. That’s why disaster recovery and business continuity need to be fully integrated into your operations.
- It is often said that in order to get where you need to go, you should first figure out exactly where you are. I recommend that you initiate a process that allows you to identify technical gaps, put together teams of stakeholders to assign tasks, and look at whatever compliance and regulatory issues are relevant.
All of this can be accomplished with a three or four step process. At the same time, your business continuity plan will involve:
- Examining or creating emergency plans and procedures
- Working up communications policies to alert those same key stakeholders
- Prioritizing critical business processes
- Creating a command center
Again, you will need to look at legal and regulatory requirements to ensure that you are in compliance—also doable in a straightforward, step-by-step process.
As it happens, the most powerful formula for data integrity can involve integrating cloud backup services, recovery, managed cloud services, disaster preparedness planning and business continuity planning. That kind of fully unified business network is the hallmark of the era of digital transformation.
I hope you found this information helpful. As always, contact us anytime about your technology needs.
Until next time,
Tim
