Why you need a Disaster Recovery plan?
Benjamin Franklin said, “Nothing in this world can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”.
When we consider the reliance of a business on IT systems, we can also say with certainty that, along with death and taxes, should a major IT systems outage occur, it can have a detrimental impact on your business, reputation and your customers perception. A mitigation against the potential impact of an outage is to develop and maintain a Disaster Recovery (DR) Plan.
Why develop a disaster recovery plan?
When you consider emerging phenomena such as Spyware, Phishing and Ransomware then no business that has any reliance on IT can be considered safe. Disaster recovery planning is not just for large and enterprise scale businesses, it’s for all businesses.
According to Cybersecurity Ventures, Ransomware damages reached $5 billion in 2017 and IBM reported that 70% of businesses paid to get their data back from ransomware attackers in 2016. In the case of traditional risks, research has shown that the most common causes of IT outages are Power, Human Failure and Natural Disaster with the direct costs annually running to 2.5BN dollars (IDC). It is fair to say preventative and remedial security measures such as an effective Disaster Recovery plan have now become essential.
What is disaster recovery planning?
DR planning is putting in place the measures and actions to be taken in the event of an IT systems failure to recovery those systems to an acceptable state in an acceptable timeframe. It is a component part of a company’s security profile, as well as being an essential element of a comprehensive Business Continuity Management (BCM). However, a DR plan should not be confused with BCM, which is much broader and considers not only IT but environmental as well has human impacts on a business’s ability to operate.
Disaster Recovery Challenges
When we look at what is involved in implementing a DR plan, a lot of companies struggle with two main challenges – Budget and Expertise.
No one wants to spend money on something you hope will never be used, and a lot of companies don’t have, or want to have, the expertise to plan the detail on delivering and maintain what could be a complex IT operation…….. that no one wants to ever use!
Defining a Disaster Recovery Budget
Cloud services now make the possibility of an Enterprise level DR solution at an main street price a reality for a lot of IT environments. Cloud solutions now mean that for relatively low costs (when compared to investing in hardware and onsite services) any company can have robust DR solution that provides levels of availability that would have previously been beyond reach in terms of cost.
Identifying Disaster Recovery Experts
On the challenge of expertise: Companies can now extend a Cloud service to becoming a Managed Cloud Service for Disaster Recovery. Outsourcing the setup, operation and maintenance of your entire DR requirement to an expert partner but doing it at a completely affordable price point.
What Disaster Recovery Plan do I need?
There are two concepts that you can use to determine what level of DR Plan you might need. You should look at the business processes that run your business, then look at the IT systems that these processes depend on (end to end), and define:
1. RPO: The Recovery Point Objective for the systems driving your business. Basically, if you must restore or recover and entire system – how old can the data be? This may seem obvious, but it is very important to realise that if you have a backup at 2am in the morning, what is on your backup is all your data up to 2am. If the server fails at 4pm the following afternoon and you must recover from backup, what you get back is all the data to 2am that morning. i.e. all information from then to 4pm is lost. In this example, 2am is the recovery point.
2. RTO: The Recovery Time Objective for your systems, is how long can you be without a system before your business (or the process affected) starts to become seriously impacted. For example, if you have an online ordering system and it becomes unavailable, how long can you sustain business without the system being online?
While RTO & RPO are linked, they can have different goals. i.e. you might need a system back online within 2 hours to enable business transactions, but the data can be a day old, or recovered offline as it is not urgent. Conversely, you might have an RTO of 24 hours, but the data must be no older than 15min!
Kickstarting your Disaster Recovery Plan
All businesses should now be, if not already, considering how a DR plan can form part of a security and business continuity process to safeguard operations, integrity and reputation. Managed Cloud services bring the capability of Enterprise DR solutions to all business’s. Once you have defined your reliance on IT, through a simple process of defining Recovery Point and Time Objectives, you can begin to formulate a plan to protect your IT and your business.
For more information on Disaster Recovery, or to speak to one of our expert team, contact us today.
