IT Business leaders too often place Disaster Recovery plans on the back burner because day-to-day tasks interfere with planning for the future. Most business owners justify not being prepared for a Disaster or “Data Loss” event because they tend to only think of the grand disasters, such as Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and the like. They assume the likelihood of such an event is low and will plan for it sometime soon in the future.
The reality is that these events are not the most likely “Data Loss” events that happen every day. Perhaps “Disaster Recovery” is poorly named and should be called “Data Loss Recovery.” Needing to perform Data Loss Recovery is realistic and likely to happen to any business or organization. Consider these Data Loss events that a typical IT organization is expected to see (in order of likelihood):
User error and the human factor (e.g., disgruntled employees)
- Viruses and Ransomware
- Password and security issues
- Upgrades that went wrong
- Power Outages
If you still think a Data Loss Recovery situation will never happen, consider two statistics reported by Forbes.
- Of the businesses that experience a disaster, 43% never even get to the point of reopening.
- Of those businesses that do reopen, only 29% were still operating after 18 months! months!
The risk of a Data Loss Recovery event is much higher than the expense of protecting against one. When the time for recovery arrives, the concern turns to your organization’s RPO and RTO: Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective.
- Recovery Point Objective defines the amount of information you are willing to lose.
- Recovery Time Objective defines the amount of time you are willing to wait to get back the information you lost.
How can you begin to craft a Data Loss Recovery Plan?
Here are four steps to creating an effective Data Loss Recovery Plan
- You need to understand if you need BUaaS (Backup as a Service) or DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) or some of each. Here is how you distinguish the difference between the two.
BUaaS – Replicates a COPY of your data at specified intervals. Can be useful to satisfy compliance requirements. Lower cost than DRaaS because it has an older RPO and a longer RTO.
DRaaS – Replicates LIVE data in real (or near real) time to an actively waiting target server. Often selected for business availability requirements. More expensive solution than BUaaS because it has a very recent RPO and a very small RTO.
- Choose your data protection application(s). We help customers every day select the data protection tools fitting their Data Loss Recovery requirements. Here are examples that we work with on a regular basis:
- Ask yourself these questions: How vital are Availability and Orchestration? How much automation does your Data Loss Recovery require to meet the business’ availability requirements? Automation can further shrink your RTO but has a cost.
- Testing and Validating your Data Loss Recovery Periodically you need to verify that Plan and confirm your strategies and tactics for recovering the businesses information. The state of Backup and Data Loss Recovery today, fortunately, enables much more automation. More automation eliminates human error.
Once you have a Data Loss Recovery Plan, selected the hardware and software components meeting the plan’s requirements, and deployed and tested your plan, you are on your way to avoiding losing your business from a preventable Data Loss.
Data Loss Recovery Strategies and Deployments are a VirtuIT Systems specialty. Whether on-premise or in the cloud we focus on our slogan: “Managing & Protecting Businesses’ Most Important Asset.”
Contact us today to get started!
