Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Why You Need a BCDR Solution
A good business continuity and disaster recovery plan should be considered essential for organizations of all types. However, data protection rarely gets proper attention — even though ignoring it can have serious implications. So, why should you care?
Downtime is Expensive
If your employees or customers do not have access to essential applications and data, there will be a direct impact on productivity and revenue. While this sounds obvious, many organizations do not consider the actual costs of downtime. To better understand the cost of downtime, consider the following example. Let’s say your business has 100 employees, average hourly revenue is $1,500 and the backup data set amounts to 2 TB. Given these parameters, a full restore from a local backup using traditional backup software would take over 8 hours. The associated downtime cost would amount to $34,000 in lost revenue.
Some modern data protection products offer the ability to run applications from the backup device or in the cloud. This allows users to continue operations while primary application servers are restored. Choosing a BCDR solution aimed at reducing downtime makes good business sense.
Backup Alone is Not Enough
You’d be hard pressed to find a business today that doesn’t conduct some form of data backup. But, what happens if a flood wipes out your primary and backup servers? Sending a copy of data offsite for disaster recovery should also be considered essential. Historically, this meant sending tapes to a secondary location or tape vault. As noted above, modern BCDR products can run applications from backup instances of virtual servers, and some can extend this capability to the cloud.
This approach is frequently called cloud DR or disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). The ability to run applications in the cloud while onsite infrastructure is restored is widely considered to be a game changer for disaster recovery.
“Lower-case d” Disasters
Not every disaster is a widespread natural disaster. In fact, most IT downtime is a result of things like accidental (or intentional) data deletion, damage to computer hardware and poor security habits. For example, a recent CompTIA study found that 94% of respondents routinely log into public wifi, in spite of security risks. And, 69% of this group accesses work-related data over public wifi. A cryptolocker attack or virus can halt operations just as easily as a burst pipe or a power surge.
These “lower-case d” disasters happen regularly and the associated downtime costs build over time. Having technology in place that allows your business to continue operations following these small disasters is equally, if not more, important than protecting against a hurricane that may or may not occur.
Business Continuity is Everyone’s Concern
Data is essential for all types of organizations today, so ensuring access to applications and data following a disaster is critical. But it’s just one piece of the data protection puzzle. Evaluating your business’ ability to restore IT operations can be a good starting point for company-wide business continuity efforts. Good business continuity planning should look at the business as a whole, and the goal should be to develop business resilience. In fact, many business continuity planning efforts start by conducting a business impact analysis or risk assessment — these studies can reveal weaknesses in your business’ ability to continue operations that go far beyond IT.
Contact The High Tech Solution for more information on all these services.
The High Tech Solution has partnered with Kaseya/Datto to give your business the right solution, that fits your business, within your budget and provides the necessary security you need.
TheHighTechSolution.com · Jeff@theHighTechSolution.com · Datto SIRIS