Creating a Resilient BCDR Plan: Strategies, Steps, and Implementation
Introduction On July 19, 2024, millions of Windows computers worldwide, suddenly displayed the d...
What do businesses use as a leverage point to mint revenue and profits? It’s DATA. Companies now use advanced data analytics to launch their innovative products and services in the market, improve operations, or make better decisions based on correct information. In short, data is the HEARTBEAT for businesses. So it is understandable why they go to great extents to protect it from corruption or loss. This is where robust backup and disaster recovery (DR) strategies come into play.
Historically, companies adopted traditional data protection solutions, but with the tremendous growth of data, the ability to effectively safeguard it and ensure a clean recovery for access during an outage has become increasingly doubtful.
Failing to modernize their backup and disaster recovery (DR) strategies has cost many businesses millions. A 2015 study from EMC suggested that data loss and downtime cost a total of $1.7 trillion each year (The Real Cost). Since data is becoming digital that number is expected to increase as time goes on.
Here’s why traditional backup and disaster recovery solutions are no longer enough, and how modern cloud-based approaches offer a more reliable and efficient way to protect your business:
Concerns arise for data integrity for the companies who are still deploying tape backups. Data backup tapes are built with magnetic media, which is extremely vulnerable to corruption and exposure. With data backup tapes, data is usually saved to the magnetic media, and any exposure to a fingerprint or getting too close to a magnetized area, makes the data on the tape unusable, and you will only know about the corruption when you try to restore and find it isn’t there.
There seems to be a significant failure rate on magnetic media, but still, people assume the data that is stored on their tapes is safe and sound.
Solution:
Fortunately, advancements in technology offer more robust and reliable alternatives to traditional tape backups.
By transitioning away from tape backups and embracing modern solutions, organizations can significantly reduce the risk of data corruption and ensure the reliability of their backups. This translates to improved business continuity and peace of mind in the event of a disaster or data loss event.
One of the major hurdles with traditional backup and disaster recovery solutions is their limited scalability. Many organizations struggle to accurately predict their future data storage needs. Underestimating these needs leads to insufficient backup capacity, requiring additional investment beyond the initial setup costs.
Solution: Cloud-based backup and disaster recovery solutions offer a powerful advantage in this regard – scalable storage. These solutions eliminate the need for upfront investment in physical backup infrastructure that may become inadequate as your data volume grows.
Here’s how cloud-based backup and disaster recovery addresses the challenge:
By leveraging cloud-based scalable storage, organizations can overcome the challenge of unpredictable data growth and ensure their backup and disaster recovery strategy remains adaptable and cost-effective in the face of ever-increasing data volumes.
While traditional backup and disaster recovery approaches may involve storing backups offsite to protect against local disasters, this method has limitations. What happens if the offsite facility itself is impacted by a natural disaster or other disruptive event?
Solution: Cloud-based backup and disaster recovery offer a more resilient approach to disaster recovery
By adopting cloud-based backup and disaster recovery, organizations can achieve a more robust disaster recovery strategy, ensuring business continuity even when faced with unforeseen events.
Today, data protection is a high concern for today’s enterprises, businesses need to think about more than local backup and recovery, which is “disaster recovery.” When it comes to traditional backup and disaster recovery solutions, it limits a business’s ability to focus on disaster recovery due to the complexity and time it takes to restore data. As a result, businesses will employ less reliable disaster recovery plans and will face a greater risk in the event of a disaster.
Solution: Modern Backup and Disaster Recovery solutions are designed for simplicity and ease of use. They can automate disaster recovery processes, minimizing downtime and ensuring faster business continuity.
Businesses still clinging to traditional backup infrastructure miss out on the benefits of the cloud. This can lead to slower recovery times and limited protection for long-term data retention.
Solution: Cloud-based backup and Disaster Recovery solutions leverage the power and scalability of the cloud, offering faster backups, easier disaster recovery, and secure long-term data storage. Cloud providers are dedicated to making cloud DR adoption easy and accessible for businesses of all sizes
Traditional recovery time ranges from a couple of days to weeks, and to restore the last known state of the data center, each server node has to be re-initiated, with tedious installations of the base operating system and the entire application software, including all updates and patches. Additionally, the entire network configuration has to be restored to match the original settings, including VLANs, VPNs, DNS, and firewall rules. After doing all this, the actual backup can be loaded, either incrementally or at once including all user accounts, databases, documents, and other elements in their latest state. In case, if the last backup was done several days or weeks ago, recovery can become a long and time-consuming process.
According to EMC, “For each hour of downtime, organizations tend to lose thousands of dollars. On average, businesses experienced 25 hours of unexpected downtime, with 36% of them reporting revenue loss and 34% reporting delays in product development due to the disruptions” (Downtime and Data Loss).
Solution: Modern backup and disaster recovery solutions offer significantly faster recovery times, minimizing downtime and associated financial losses.
Protecting your data is equivalent to protecting money, it needs to be held somewhere really secure where you can easily access it in case of emergency. We know a secure place for money is the bank and similarly, for data, it is in the cloud. Cloud backup and Disaster Recovery solutions are more reliable, fast, and secure than traditional backup solutions. Zmanda Pro is an all-in-one solution for backup and disaster recovery that protects files, servers, and entire data centers. This modern solution is designed for companies that have an extremely low tolerance for data loss, downtime, or risk mitigation. Want to take a free trial with Zmanda? Start now.
Be sure to check out Points to Include in Your Disaster Recovery Plan