As much as companies would like to prevent every risk to their on-prem data centers, traumatic incidents are unavoidable. Equipment fails, employees make mistakes, hackers breach your defenses, and natural disasters hit.
When an incident can’t be predicted or prevented, a strong backup and recovery solution is your only chance to restore operations and regain the information you need to make decisions.
For this reason, companies can’t afford to neglect their backup and recovery. Unfortunately, many organizations don’t back up frequently enough and fail to test their recovery systems regularly.
If your business hasn’t upgraded its backup and recovery tools in a while, now may be the time to rethink your approach, considering how important protecting your data is to your company. Backup and recovery may be your only resort after a breach, an outage, or a natural disaster.
Recovering From a Cyberattack
Offsite backup and recovery is crucial if your company hopes to stay in operation after a ransomware attack. Ransomware continues to dominate the threat landscape. The 2017 Health Care Cyber Research Report uncovered that ransomware attacks on health care organizations increased by a horrifying 89% between 2016 and 2017. While the health care industry is a favorite target for ransomware, no organization is immune.
In December 2017, hackers attacked Dartmouth College with a strain of ransomware called DoublePulsar. Fortunately, Dartmouth had protective software in place, so no files were successfully encrypted.
Ransomware has evolved so that on-site backup files may be automatically deleted. Backup in the cloud or in a colocation ensures that you can recover your encrypted data without paying a ransom.
Keeping the Wheels Rolling
Recently, the Henry Ford Health System lost use of its applications and electronic health records system during a power outage. For almost an entire day, staff was forced to use pen and paper to keep patient records.
For a health care organization, an outage can put patient health at risk when medical histories can’t be accessed. For other organizations, an extended outage can be crippling to company finances. IHS Markit reported that the average midsized company loses $1 million per day during an outage, while an enterprise can lose $60 million per day. Most revenue losses are due to interruptions in productivity. A backup and recovery plan that delivers fast recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives guarantees that you will be able to access the data and applications necessary to serve your clients.
Skirting a Disaster
The recent string of hurricanes, fires, floods, and record-breaking cold that has swept across the country is a grim reminder of how important backup and recovery is for a company’s survival. A natural disaster is unpredictable and can affect a large geographical area.
The wildfires in California and the floods in Texas covered huge portions of the states. If companies used colocations in those areas, their facilities would likely have been affected by the same event.
No company can afford to spend weeks or even months recovering from a natural disaster. A cloud recovery solution with automatic failover and the advantage of geographical diversity enables your company to keep running even if your physical data center is destroyed.
Finding the Right Backup and Recovery Solution
Being able to bounce back from a data breach or an outage with a minimum amount of downtime and data loss is essential to your company’s survival and success. To guarantee swift recovery after an incident, many companies are turning to the cloud for backup and recovery as a service (BRaaS).
Cloud-based backup and recovery increases your level of availability and provides advantages over on-site backup. When your primary data center is affected, cloud backup and recovery accomplishes instant failover.
For companies exploring cloud backup and recovery, FirstLight is an excellent choice. We offer affordable and reliable BRaaS as part of our cloud services. Our extensive fiber optic network gives your business great options for off-site backup with lightning-fast recovery times. With cloud backup, you can easily scale to meet increasing data growth and compliance requirements.
Considering reworking your backup and recovery strategy? Get advice from FirstLight.
