Most businesses that do not have a reliable disaster recovery plan do not survive a disaster. It might not take a significant event like a blizzard or earthquake to close your doors. Something seemingly small like spilled coffee in the server room, a cyberattack, or an accidentally deleted file could set your business back hundreds or thousands of dollars in recovery efforts. Possibly resulting in no recovery at all. Many unpredictable situations could threaten your business’s livelihood, but a damaging loss is preventable with the right disaster recovery plan in place.
The pros and cons of traditional backups.
You might have some backups, but how outdated are your methods? A traditional backup method is a simple copy of your most important data in case the original is damaged (stored on-premise or as a single cloud backup). But what about applications, emails, additional files, and even your company website hosting? If your data is stored exclusively on-premise, your backup files could be corrupted in many scenarios. Fire, flooding, spills, and power surges could all damage your data beyond recovery. Even a cloud backup stored in the same city could be problematic during a hurricane or extended power outage. In many cases, this could mean significant financial loss or total bankruptcy.
A general cloud backup is not a fully reliable disaster recovery solution, though it is better than a purely on-site backup. It will protect your data in cases of ransomware or data corruption, should you need to restore it, but it won’t always be up to date. Data syncs in intervals which could still result in some lost files where there is a discrepancy between the source and the target database. It may also take hours or days to restore a backup, resulting in additional losses and expensive fees if you need to hire outside help to recover.
What does a reliable disaster recovery solution look like?
A reliable disaster recovery plan will replicate data for business continuity. This copies and synchronizes your on-premise data to the cloud in real time. We recommend a georedundant data center mirrored to other storage facilities in a different geographic area. This keeps your data backed up and secured with full encryption (both in transit and at rest) during any disruption.
Protecting only some of your business with a mediocre backup is not worth risking the cost of a potential disaster. The negative impacts are deeper than just data loss costs alone. They also include lost customers, negative PR, and additional IT hires or consultant fees to guide recovery. A reliable disaster recovery solution should keep your business open under any circumstance. Even if the office becomes inaccessible, you’d have secure access to applications and real-time data 24/7.
Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective
The ideal disaster recovery plan would return your business to normal functioning levels by the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and the Recovery Point Objective (RPO). It’s important to note that these are just objectives. The gap between the objectives and actuals can only be seen through actual disasters and well-planned disruption rehearsals.
RTO is the amount of time you must restore your business processes before you reach large consequences and losses.
Question to ask: How much time did it take to recover after the first notification of a disaster?
RPO is the maximum amount of time that could pass before the amount of data lost exceeds the decided threshold. This varies with each application and functional department.
Question to ask: At what point in time (how many hours/days) could the process realistically recover, given the amount of data loss during that period of time?
CCSi takes the time to understand your business and work with you to calculate these objectives. We create a disaster recovery plan that fits your business and budget so you experience minimal downtime.
