Why Disaster Recovery (DR) Plan Has To Include Cloud Data Backup

Natural disasters such as wildfires, floods, and hurricanes affect the world more and more. The events affect businesses around the globe in a way that causes damage worth billions of US dollars. That cost is only going to go up. Extreme weather phenomena are increasing, and these events will affect enterprises and communities more and more.

Every business should take the measures required to keep itself safe and reduce the damage that occurs due to the events mentioned above. It is unfortunate that a large number of enterprises fail to take those steps. As per FEMA, 40% of enterprises do not open again after a natural calamity. Furthermore, the US SBA says that more than 90% of businesses fail in 24 months of facing a natural disaster.

Many key factors play a part in the capability of getting the affected enterprise in operation again. The capability of recovering mission-critical systems and data at maximum speed might be the most important factor.

Is Your Business Capable?

Take the following measures to make your business more likely to reestablish continuity and effectively recover from a disaster.

Know The Distinction Between Data Backup And Data Recovery

Moving a copy of your business’s data to cloud storage is a cost-effective and important step in a disaster recovery (DR) plan. It is possibly labor-intensive and costly to handle and maintain on-premises disaster recovery (DR) infrastructure.

Anyhow, it is just the starting step. Numerous enterprises feel that making a cloud backup of their data is the beginning and ending step in disaster preparedness. Those enterprises do not realize that just backup will not suffice. It is also important to have a plan in place to get back your cloud-based data fast during an emergency. Without establishing a robust DR plan, you could not recover the precise version of the folder/file you require after a loss of data.

Consider that in the following manner. Attempting to recover the backup with no DR plan is similar to trying to put the pieces of a jigsaw together with many pieces scattered everywhere and a few pieces missing. That would not be good enough if you are facing a calamity and you require the data immediately. The right recovery plan will aid you in setting up all your pieces when you should not waste even one second.

Determine Your Recovery Time Objective And Recovery Point Objective

ROP and RTO are part of all fine disaster recovery plans, and the same goes for means to accomplish these goals. RPO is important for cloud data backup, and it is the metric that you establish for the volume of data that your enterprise could lose if a disaster arises. Your recovery point objective plays an important part in determining how frequently you should do a data backup, plus the infrastructure that you want established to support the backup plan. The recovery point objective is more about setting up the framework to allow getting every data you require at the right time.

Conversely, the recovery time objective is among the different metrics useable to better understand what effect the downtime can have on your enterprise. Establishing your RTO will put you in a stronger position for making informed and proper choices regarding your DR plan. Imagine that you have found out that your enterprise can handle just 120 minutes of downtime. If this is the case, you would have to put money into cloud-based DR technology that allows recovering data in that timeframe.

Stop Cyberattacks

A natural disaster is not your lone issue. The unfortunate fact is that malicious parties will seek all opportunities to take advantage of that and damage your business in some way. When attempting to recover from a calamity, there will be greater cybersecurity risk than in the past since you will be most vulnerable then. Cybercriminals are similar to sharks in that they approach with the intention of damaging you when they see you are most vulnerable.

The proper cloud data backup and data recovery plan will allow protecting your data although a ransomware targets you. Your enterprise should seek a cloud data storage service that allows frequent backup creation, protects data constantly through snapshots per 90 seconds and has more recovery points than one.

Albeit ransomware enters your cloud server and destroys the data stored in the device, you could recover it fast. This form of backup is unchangeable, so it will always have a set of data recovery points, which will help to confirm that your data stays protected.

In the case of losing the data due to a calamity, you cannot propel your business. Anyhow, with the proper cloud-based DR plan in place, it is possible to get important business operations functioning again and endure the worst effects of cybercrime or Mother Nature.