In one of its recent reports, Gartner found that 72 percent of organizations are not well-equipped to deal with disaster recovery, with 59 percent of respondents expecting budgetary increases for DR capabilities this year. The pandemic and the switch to remote work has increased the scope of vulnerabilities manifold for organizations. A report by the Ponemon Institute’s report, Cybersecurity in the Remote Work Era, found that only 45% of businesses believe they have the funds required to adequately prepare for the increased scope of cyberattacks brought on as a result of remote work. Only 39% believe that their staff has the necessary technical expertise required to build an effective defense. Increasing amounts of cyber-attacks and weather volatility has definitely pushed companies towards an enhanced focus on disaster recovery. Companies with little to no DR capabilities are trying to implement traditional DRaaS solutions, while others with significant investments in DRaaS are starting to look into improving their overall IT resilience. Disaster Recovery & Backup Planning Vancouver can help with both.Data has become the fundamental building block in the operations of any organization irrespective of the industry it is active in. Data loss, whether it is the result of human error, hardware failure, malware, or hacking – the impact is always substantial and can even be devastating. A disaster recovery plan can help organizations safeguard their mission-critical data and help quickly resume operations and restore services irrespective of the scale or nature of the disaster or emergency.An information technology (IT) disaster recovery plan is best developed in tandem with a business continuity plan (BCP). And the first step to creating those plans comes with a thorough business impact analysis or BIA. This helps companies decide on the IT priorities and recovery time objectives. The team engaged in disaster recovery should also time technology recovery strategies for restoring applications, hardware, and data to meet business recovery needs. Cybersecurity Services Vancouver can help you conduct comprehensive assessments and help devise your own DR plan.Although the specifics of company situations will always change and there is no right way to build a disaster recovery plan, it typically features three main objectives:
- Prevention of threats, including proper backups, generators, and surge protectors
- Detection of new threats, that can be discovered through routine inspections
- Correction, which might include learning from past security incidents, brainstorming sessions and having the proper insurance policies in place
Data Center Disaster Recovery
This can be understood as a particular approach to the disaster recovery plan that is not essentially limited to the physical location or computing facility it’s located in. Data Center Disaster Recovery plans cover the entire building and are comprehensive in nature. This means that even unique building features and tools, such as physical security, support personnel, backup power, HVAC, utility providers, and firefighting equipment all come into play in data center DR. When disaster strikes, a comprehensive plan will make use of all of these distinctive features to protect against the current threat – whether it’s intruders at the gate or cyber criminals conspiring to breach into your network.
Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery
This approach makes use of a cloud service provider’s data center as the organization’s primary data recovery site. This can help companies significantly reduce costs associated with disaster recovery as there is no need to maintain your own data center’s facilities, personnel, and systems. In fact, companies can also leverage cost benefits from the stiff competition between cloud providers. However, before committing to a cloud-based approach to DR, you should ensure that your cloud service provider is actually compatible with the particular needs of your business’ backup and recovery. In fact, it’s a good idea to actually consult with your service provider to see if they can help you to fix some of your existing issues with DR.
Virtualization Disaster Recovery
Virtualization Disaster Recovery does away with the need to reconstruct a physical server in the event of a disaster. This helps companies to be more efficient in achieving their targeted recovery time objectives (RTO) with comparative ease thanks to the placement of a virtual server on reserve capacity or the cloud. Managed IT Services Vancouver can help you with Virtualization Disaster Recovery.
Disaster Recovery as a Service
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) can be cloud-based, but also offered as a site-to-site service, in which the service providers have the responsibility to host and run a secondary hot site. Providers can also offer to rebuild and ship servers to you as part of a server replacement service. Cloud-based DRaaS is more straightforward as it immediately enables companies to failover applications, orchestrate failback to rebuilt servers, and reconnect users through VPN or Remote Desktop Protocol. When looking for a DRaaS provider, it is always useful to know whether they offer the service as their own product or make use of DRaaS tools from partner vendors. It’s also useful to know where they are located and what data center resources they are using. This helps you gauge the vendor’s capabilities and know the extent of support you can expect during an emergency. If you are building a comprehensive disaster recovery plan from scratch, the task may seem challenging and even overwhelming. But finding the right approach for your organization can help you stay protected from a plethora of significant business threats including cyber-attacks, natural disasters, malicious actors, insider attacks and human error and also help protect the integrity of your data in the long term.
