Business Continuity: How to limit the impact of these 5 major disasters

Summary

Which disaster recovery solution offers the best benefits.

Time: 3 minute read

Disasters can befall a company. Some may be preventable, but many cannot. Major disasters may best be described as those outside your control. Yet, even if they are outside your control, it doesn’t mean you can’t limit their impact with a well-prepared disaster recovery solution.

5 Major Types of Disasters

We’ve found the five most common major disasters are:

Hardware failure
Software corruption
Cyber-attacks
Power outages
Natural disasters with location-wide impacts

Anyone of these, if not prepared for in advance, can grind your business to halt. Three of the five – hardware failure, software corruption, and cyber-attacks – can be mitigated by regular image and file backups based on pre-determined Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO).

In situations where a disaster occurs in a company’s building or its data center, backups alone won’t get a business back online. Effectively, even a perfect backup plan does you no good if you find yourself separated from your data – be it due to disaster natural or otherwise.

So, how can a company mitigate all five of these risks, especially in a cost-effective manner?

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Disaster Recovery as a Service

You’re familiar with disaster recovery. Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) provides organizations with a mechanism to replicate everything within their physical datacenter to a virtual datacenter within a cloud provider, without the large capital investment in hardware or overhead.

Benefits of DRaaS

DRaaS offers companies that embrace it many benefits over traditional disaster recovery solutions. When deployed, DRaaS:
1.   Mitigates the amount of downtime due to complete organizational outages.
2.   Enables users to connect to the cloud datacenter in the same manner as they would connect to their physical datacenter resources.
3.   Provides geographic flexibility to ensure DRaaS data centers are not in the same area as a company’s own location(s), to avoid both going down.
4.   Creates a transparent transition for the company – whether you need it to address a short-term issue (like a power outage) or something that may require a longer-term solution (like a natural disaster).
5.   Introduces redundancy options for added “insurance” and to ensure uptime.
6.   Supports business continuity planning.

But, how do you begin to determine what you need and how to prepare?

Start with a Business Impact Analysis

Is DRaaS right for you?

Disaster recovery solutions work best when built around your business’ unique needs. DRaaS represents the most customizable and complete solution – you can design it to your specific need and, as the infrastructure is already in place, is about as turnkey as possible.

But, how do you begin to determine what you need and how to prepare?

Start with a Business Impact Analysis (BIA). This analysis determines your risks and their impact should they ever occur. It evaluates both operational and financial impacts, to give you a clear view of what your disaster recovery plan must include to protect your business.

If you have questions about disaster recovery, DRaaS, or a Business Impact Analysis, our experts are ready to speak with you.