07-14-20 | Blog Post
Something as simple as a clogged drain impacts communications to North Carolina schools. A seemingly routine frozen pipe damages a New Hampshire hospital’s medical data. Unbelievably, a loud noise causes service disruptions for a Romanian bank data center. On the other end of the spectrum we have the well-publicized damage wrought by natural disasters. For example, massive flooding in the UK caused an outage for a Vodafone datacenter, New Zealand earthquakes in 2011 displaced thousands of businesses, and Hurricane Sandy taking down online business and news media in 2012.
All of these examples point to one fact: Safeguarding and making your data survivable, in the data center and/or the cloud, is a critical business imperative. It is also important to consider that as business continues to transition much of its data and applications from premises based to cloud and SaaS based, the business continuity and disaster recovery plans need to be adjusted accordingly. Today’s cloud-based disaster recovery can provide the advantages of faster restoral times, improved business economics, and being infinitely scalable to all dimensions of disaster recovery requirements.
Managed Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) provides the highest level of DR and business continuity via the added benefit of a 24x7x365 support team, acting as an extension of your staff to minimize disruption to your mission-critical data and applications. These teams are also highly trained and experienced in DR as business transitions from legacy data center infrastructure to cloud based environments; experience you may not have on your teams today.
The statistics that reference business survivability after a natural disaster are grim. According to FEMA, 40 percent of businesses do not reopen after experiencing a natural disaster. For companies that do manage to reopen, only 29% were still operating after two years. The implications are obvious – the efficacy of your disaster recovery plan has repercussions up to and including the very life of the business itself. As you update and refine your disaster recovery and business continuity plans, there are several measurable benefits that cloud computing can bring to protect the business against natural disasters:
As an added safeguard, for the ability to use your business applications and access data in the event of a disaster, it is important to consider if your identity and access management (IAM) solution can be shifted to the cloud. In the event of a disaster your users may lose their identities thereby denying their access to applications and data.
No business is invulnerable to natural disasters, but expedient and efficient recovery enabled by an airtight DR plan, and the appropriate services to fully support the DR plan, is not only expected by today’s ever-demanding customers, it’s a requirement for the survivability of your business. Too many businesses fail because they lacked adequate preparation for a disaster, when even the simplest DR element like online backup could have easily minimized damage to the business and expedited recovery of critical data and processes. If you haven’t thought about updating your DR plan, it should be at the top of your priority list. Business uptime has never been more critical and the incorporation of new elements of DR never more important than during today’s mass migration to cloud and SaaS.
Looking for help developing your disaster recovery plan or understanding the impacts of cloud-based DR? Otava can help. Our experts can help you create and execute a DR runbook and plan, design and architect your recovery environment, and even manage it for you, all with Disaster Recovery as a Service. Contact us to learn more or download our Disaster Recovery white paper.
Cloud Backup for Microsoft 365: According to Veeam research, a staggering 74 percent of Microsoft 365 users have no protection strategy – despite the fact that Microsoft 365 does not come with comprehensive or long-term backup.
Do You Have the Right Levels of DR and Backup for each Workload? An analysis of the value of each workload and its overall impact on the business, in the event of disruption or loss, is a critical precursor to determining the level of disaster recovery required.
Disaster Recovery Lessons We Can All Learn: Thanks to the cloud, disaster recovery has evolved from a complex beast that was difficult and expensive to manage into something a little simpler and tamer to handle.
