It’s no secret that disasters can strike at any time. Whether it’s a hurricane, earthquake, or cyberattack, natural disasters and other forms of crisis can have an especially devastating impact on businesses.
Fortunately, there are ways to prepare for the unplanned—even if you operate a small, home-based business. The cloud is a great way to store data and keep it safe. This can be especially useful when you are looking for a disaster recovery solution.
What is disaster recovery?
Businesses worry about data loss and the loss of critical systems. These concerns can be alleviated with a disaster recovery plan. A disaster recovery plan acts as a backup in the event of a disaster. It can also help you to mitigate risk by providing a fallback system in the event of an incident.
Disaster recovery usually involves restoring the systems, applications, and data that were affected by the natural or man-made incident.
What is cloud disaster recovery?
Cloud disaster recovery is the practice of using hosted computer resources to get back up and running after a disruption. In other words, it’s bringing the cloud to your data centre to store your critical data.
The advantages of cloud disaster recovery are that you can offload all that data storage and backup responsibility to a service such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure. This can be a big relief to businesses that don’t have the skills or facilities to manage data backup and recovery.
How are they different?
Cloud disaster recovery is a much different approach than traditional disaster recovery. It uses the software bundle or virtual server instead of loading it with OS and applications like a normal DR solution would.
This means in just minutes, you can have an exact copy of your data somewhere else if needed.
Advantages of cloud disaster recovery
With cloud-based disaster recovery, you can minimise downtime and data loss for your business, lower disaster recovery costs, and stay in compliance with regulatory requirements.
Improve data security
Your data is stored in an isolated location with limited access. If a disaster occurs and you can’t reach your data, it’s less likely to be compromised.
Improve availability
Your data is stored in multiple geographical locations, protecting you against blackouts and other causes of outages.
Improve scalability
You can grow your business without having to upgrade your hardware, saving you time and money.
The importance of data backup
Data backup is an important step in the process of managing information, and is especially relevant for businesses that deal with a lot of data. It’s also useful for individuals who store their information on devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets.
Data backup ensures that the information is stored in multiple locations and can be restored if something happens to the original source of the data.
One way to manage data backup is by using a cloud storage service. Cloud storage services offer unlimited storage space and are accessible from anywhere with internet connection. Businesses can use cloud storage to store files, documents, and backups that they need to access on a regular basis.
Creating a cloud disaster recovery plan
Your recovery plan should include:
- Where critical data is located.
- What resources are needed for the recovery process.
- A list of critical business processes and applications that must be recovered, along with an explanation as to what they do and how often they are used.
- System backup procedures in case of a disaster.
It is important to maintain your DRP. This will help you identify any problems before something bad happens, and then make adjustments and improvements in a timely manner so nothing can go wrong when an incident arises. Regular reminders, drills, tests keep your DRPs fresh – keeping everyone attentive of potential disasters that could occur.
Strategies for business continuity
Business continuity plans and disaster recovery plans go hand-in-hand. They are made up of processes for different types of disasters, such as cyberattacks, power outages, or natural disasters. It includes a detailed outline of how your business will continue its operations during an emergency.
Your business continuity plan should include:
- Names, contact information, and roles of the key people involved in keeping the business running.
- Physical and technical assets that are critical to the continuity of the business.
- Procedures that are needed to follow in order to maintain the physical and technical assets.
- Communication plan that will be used during an emergency that includes both internal and external communication.
Get the right solutions before the unexpected happens
Business continuity and disaster recovery is important. In fact, it’s necessary to ensure that your business continues to run in the event of an incident or disaster. The cloud can be a great way to store data and provide access to it from any location.
The cloud specialists at RODIN can help you backup all your critical data in the cloud, migrate, create a disaster recovery plan, and much more. Talk to them today and be prepared.
