disaster recovery services protect your business from downtime due to natural disasters, equipment failure or cyber attacks. These solutions allow you to replicate data and computer processing in a remote location that’s not affected by the problem.
The type of DR service you need depends on your organization’s risk tolerance and the amount of time you want to be able to recover following a disaster. For example, a ransomware prevention DR plan is an essential tool to mitigate the impact of malware attacks by isolating infected systems and using immutable backups to restore critical data. A cloud-based disaster recovery solution like DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) is another option to consider for maximum flexibility, security and scalability.
An effective DR strategy requires a well-defined plan, which should include the types of DR activities that will take place, along with what information must be backed up and how often. You should also establish your recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO), which create limits for how much data loss you can tolerate and the amount of downtime you’re willing to accept after a disaster occurs.
For example, a RTO of one hour would mean that your business can be back online within an hour of a data center outage, while a RPO of three hours means that you’ll have enough time to restore a complete system backup. In addition, you should decide whether to use an internal or external DR site. Internal sites require hardware configuration, support equipment, power maintenance, heating and cooling and a dedicated staff. An external DR site can be hot, warm or cold and can include a secondary data center or third-party hosting provider.
DR planning should also include a detailed list of mission-critical applications and the steps you will take to keep those systems running if your primary data center goes down. This includes backups and recovery strategies, as well as who will be responsible for restoring those systems. Ideally, you will test your DR plan regularly so that you’re prepared for the worst-case scenario when it comes to downtime.
As threats evolve, the need for organizations to rethink their disaster recovery strategy continues to grow. As a result, more and more businesses are turning to Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to minimize downtime caused by human error, natural disasters, infrastructure failures or cyber attacks. DRaaS is a category of cloud computing that delivers business continuity services in the form of virtualized IT resources that can be spun up instantly.
This type of DR provides flexibility and scalability that can be adjusted to fit your organization’s needs. This technology reduces the need for redundant hardware, reduces costs and reduces the time required to set up and manage a new environment. This is just one of many innovative ways that the emergence of the cloud is changing the IT landscape. Read on to learn more about how disaster recovery solutions are evolving and the benefits of a DRaaS approach.