These days, everyone is in full preparedness mode. People are sheltering in place, wiping down surfaces, and donning face masks if they go out. Companies need to extend this mindset to their disaster recovery strategies.
ITWeb, a technology news source, reported that COVID-19 is causing companies to rethink the way they approach disaster recovery. Business analysts argue that organizations must be flexible, proactive, and predictive to maintain business continuity after a disaster.
To be prepared, a company must have a disaster recovery plan that is flexible enough to respond to any cause of downtime. Turning to a managed service provider for disaster recovery can alleviate risk by giving your company access to a staff of experts who have seen it all and have the right resources.
Triggers for a Disaster
Disasters can be triggered by many things. Each event affects your company’s data and systems in a different way and has its own disaster recovery requirements.
Some causes of traumatic events are:
Natural Disaster: A blizzard, hurricane, flood, or wildfire can damage or destroy your physical location. If mission-critical data and applications aren’t backed up in a secondary location, your company can’t recover vital information.
Ransomware: If an employee opens an email attachment that has been infected with ransomware, hackers can encrypt your files, locking down company systems. The perpetrators then demand a ransom in cyber currency for the decryption key. Today’s ransomware can even delete on-site backup files.
According to the 2019 Global State of Cybersecurity in Small and Medium-Sized Businesses survey, 57% of attacks are accomplished through phishing or social engineering.
Hardware Failure: Equipment ages, weakens, and suffers breakdowns. It can be hard to predict when hardware is going to fail. When hardware reaches end of support, recovery can be tricky.
Power Loss: Windstorms, blizzards, or strain on the power grid during peak times can cause a power outage. Without power, your systems can’t run and vital data may be lost.
Software Failure: Like hardware, software becomes vulnerable as it ages. Software can also have bugs or require upgrades, making it susceptible to failure.
Human Error: Employees mean well, but they make mistakes. Most workers aren’t technology experts, and they may delete or lose important files by accident. According to the survey, 63% of companies experienced a breach due to employee negligence.
Disaster Recovery Challenges
Organizations need access to the right resources for disaster recovery. Many companies don’t have enough staff to focus on disaster recovery. Chances are your IT team doesn’t have the expertise to develop and carry out an optimal disaster recovery strategy. That’s not a criticism of in-house IT. Disaster recovery is not their reason for being.
Just making some backup files and storing them on-site is not a disaster recovery plan. Many types of disasters destroy these backup copies. Any data generated between backups would also be lost.
To be truly prepared for a disaster, companies need off-site resources for backing up and storing mission-critical data and applications. A redundant or secondary infrastructure allows for instant failover and minimal loss of time and data. However, provisioning, managing, and maintaining this disaster recovery site can be expensive and time consuming.
How to Be Prepared for Anything
Chances are that a company’s in-house IT team has had limited experience recovering from disasters. A managed service provider (MSP) will have experience with all kinds of disasters because it has worked with many clients over the years.
Partnering with an MSP for disaster recovery gives your business access to a deep bench of experts. The right MSP will offer all the disaster recovery tools and strategies needed to recover quickly and completely.
Cloud-based disaster recovery from an MSP gives your company access to off-site backup recovery resources. Vital data and applications can be stored and run in a location that is far enough away from your primary data center to escape a natural disaster or ransomware attack.
Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) allows for instant failback and failover. With DRaaS, your company can achieve desirable recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).
Disaster Recovery for Every Occasion
When choosing an MSP for disaster recovery, your business needs a partner that can prepare you for all types of disasters. The MSP should have the resources and strategies needed to deal with any kind of disaster, from a malicious attack to a force of nature.
FirstLight can be the ideal disaster recovery provider for companies in the Northeast. FirstLight offers DRaaS as part of our cloud services portfolio. We combine award-winning replication and recovery software with our cloud computing infrastructure. Everything is supported by our extensive high-speed fiber optic network to ensure optimal disaster recovery capabilities.
Find out more about FirstLight DRaaS. Reach out today.
