Successful business owners know how important it is to have a plan in place for when unexpected events shut down normal operations. Modern enterprises face many types of disasters, including pandemics, cyberattacks, large-scale power outages and natural disasters. Last year, companies around the world spent close to USD 219 billion on cybersecurity and security solutions, a 12% increase from the previous year according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).
Leaders know they need to be prepared but the number of solutions and scenarios to consider can be overwhelming. In this article, we’re going to look at some common threats and how disaster recovery plans (DRPs) and solutions can optimize preparedness.
Let’s start with some commonly used terms:
Disasters can cause all kinds of problems for businesses. From a flood that shuts down access to critical physical assets to a cyberattack that compromises data protection or IT infrastructure, disaster recovery plans help ensure business continuity regardless of the threat. Here are some of the most common benefits for companies that invest in disaster recovery solutions:
Business disaster recovery strategy plays a critical role in the event your organization faces an interruption due to an unplanned event. The following is a widely used, five-step process to help your organization prepare to face a variety of threats:
Depending on an enterprise’s size, industry and priorities for disaster recovery, there are many different plans to consider. After performing business impact analysis (BIA) and risk analysis (RA), an enterprise might decide it needs different DR plans in place for different assets, such as its warehouses, data centers, critical equipment or others.
Regardless of what you need to protect, the overall goal of a good DRP should be the restoration of normal business processes as quickly and safely as possible. Here are five business disaster recovery use cases to help better understand the importance of choosing the right solution and creating a strong plan.
Natural disasters like as floods, fires and earthquakes can threaten human lives and valuable buildings, equipment and software. Imagine arriving at work to discover a hurricane in another part of the world has laid waste to a warehouse where you keep your most valuable equipment. According to Forbes, 40% of small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) never reopen after a natural disaster. Strong disaster recovery plans (DRPs) help companies face a variety of natural disasters and ensure their most critical infrastructure, including their employees, remain safe.
One practice that is growing in popularity for natural disaster recovery plans is geo-redundancy. This method, where important company assets are moved offsite and even distributed across multiple locations, helps reduce the odds that the same unplanned event will impact multiple locations.
Due to its high-profile and costly nature, a cyberattack is one of the most devastating and expensive kinds of interruption a business can face. To recover from a cyberattack, enterprises often turn to a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) provider. Companies that take a DRaaS approach to creating a DRP are essentially outsourcing their DRP to a service provider. The DRaaS provider hosts and manages the necessary infrastructure for recovery, then creates and manages response plans and ensures a swift resumption of business-critical operations after the attack.
According to a recent report by Global Market Insights (GMI) (link resides outside ibm.com), the market size for DRaaS was USD 11.5 billion in 2022 and was poised to grow by 22% percent in 2023. DRaaS providers can help companies with a broad range of problems caused by cyberattacks, including restoring access to impacted systems, reducing downtime, restoring investor confidence and ensuring compliance in heavily regulated sectors.
For damage mitigation from a cloud provider or local server provider outage, many enterprises use a failover/failback process. In the event of an outage in a cloud, multicloud or local server, a system running failover/failback as part of its DRP will immediately be switched over to a backup environment. In this environment, business operations can continue to run cloud services indefinitely. In some cases, users won’t even know they aren’t using their typical cloud computing environment. When the primary server is back up and running, operations switch back and the secondary server switches off. This seamless transfer helps prevent data loss and keeps valuable services online throughout the interruption.
Along with cyberattacks, a network going down can cost millions in downtime and generate damaging news cycles for companies. Putting sound network recovery plans in place helps businesses bounce back from a variety of critical interruptions, including internet access, cellular communications, local area networks (LAN) and wide area networks (WAN).
With so many businesses relying on networked services for their core business operations, network recovery plans and solutions must clearly document the procedures and responsibilities necessary to restore service. Like cyberattack DRPs, network failure DRPs are increasingly being outsourced to DRaaS providers with specialized resources and expertise.
A data center going down can cause all kinds of problems for an enterprise. Some common threats to data storage include power outages, overstretched personnel that can result in human error, and difficulty following compliance requirements. Data center disaster recovery plans focus on the security of the facility and the employees’ ability to get back up and running after an unplanned incident.
Data center DRPs assess risk and analyze key components, such as physical environment, connectivity, power sources and security. Since data centers face a wide range of potential threats, their DRPs tend to be broader in scope than others.
In today’s fast-moving, highly competitive business environment, even a minor outage can be a game-changer for an enterprise. The demand for scalable, capable and affordable backup and recovery solutions has never been greater. Veeam on IBM Cloud provides predictable backup and fast recovery for your entire hybrid cloud—letting you more easily move on-premises workloads and backups to the cloud for disaster recovery.
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