Consider Moving Backup and Disaster Recovery to the Cloud
Whether you
are an early cloud adopter or a skeptic, it is hard to deny the reliability,
security, and scalability that it offers today. IT leaders are discovering the
transformational potential of moving disparate workloads to a single cloud
platform for greater efficiency and agility.
Forbes recently noted that by 2022, more than
60% of enterprises will have at least half of their infrastructure on
cloud-based platforms. One approach gaining traction among IT leaders is
leveraging cloud architecture for secondary workflows such as backup, archival
and disaster recovery (DR) to the cloud. Traditionally, businesses have cobbled
together multiple software solutions to address disaster recovery (DR), backup
and archival as part of a larger data protection practice which is inefficient
and costly.
Today, the
public cloud offers greater efficiency for IT, more reliability for the
business, and improved security for data. On top of the cloud’s security and
scale benefits, consolidating workflows such as backup, disaster recovery, and
other opportunities in the cloud can save enterprises anywhere from one-half to
one-third of their costs.
Learn About Backup Systems and Disaster Planning
If you are like most people, you have
lots of insurance on yourself – health insurance, life insurance, car
insurance, homeowner’s insurance, etc. And, if you are like a lot of
businesses, you, unfortunately, have very little in the way of technology
insurance. Business interruption and data loss are two of the very worst things
that can happen to an organization, so why is it that so little thought is put
into protecting against these awful possibilities?
A great deal of time and money goes into
the design, deployment, and support of your IT environment. But if backup and
disaster recovery hasn’t been at the forefront of your planning, you may find
yourself wishing you had directed more attention to scenarios you previously
thought “would never happen to me.”
You may be thinking, “We have a backup
system, so we’re good.” You may be right, but …
ü When
was the last time your IT staff performed a file restore?
ü When
was the last time a full system restore was performed?
ü Are
you backing up only data files or full system applications as well?
ü Is
your backup system self-contained on your premises or does it feature some type
of off-site service?
ü What
is the failure-to-recovery-time for your organization, and is that recovery
time fast enough to avoid lost business?
ü If
you lost power to your facility, how long could you operate?
ü If
your phone system, telephone service or Internet connection failed, what’s your
backup plan?
ü If
inclement weather rendered your office unusable, how would your operations
continue?
These are just a few of the questions
that are posed and addressed in a well-designed Business Continuity and
Disaster Planning strategy. New Castle engineers are experts at aiding in the
development and deployment of a sound strategy to protect against and recover
from business interruption and data loss.
Disaster Recovery vs. Backup. Which is right for you?
Data center downtime means an organization
can’t serve its customers and it can’t execute transactions, leading,
potentially, to thousands of dollars of lost revenue. Recent data shows that 76
percent of companies experienced an outage in the last year and only 13 percent
of those outages were the result of natural disasters. Most “disasters” are
related to human error and minor power outages, and the expectation is that
data recovery should be fast. However, using a backup solution to meet business
continuity needs is not good enough. Data backup is simply not a comprehensive
information and application recovery solution.
Common examples of backup methods include
off-site tape and cloud storage. Many companies think these methods will
protect them if there’s an outage or a disaster. The unfortunate reality is
that while backup is generally inexpensive and convenient, it does not ensure
quick recovery when a disaster occurs – it only ensures that the data is stored
somewhere and can be accessed – eventually.
What Is Backup?
As you consider backup vs disaster recovery, begin
with the basics. What is backup? In short, backup is copying your files to
another disk. This can be through a tape backup, a secondary computer, or a
cloud hosted backup solution.
It is important to have a backup solution in
place. Backup protects your data in case of theft (a single laptop to office
break-ins), employee accidents (deletion of an important file), or technical
issues (crashed hard drive). With this protection, you can access a copy of
your data and restore it easily.
What Is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster recovery is like backup but is used
for larger instances. A complete image of your disk drives and servers are
mirrored. The image allows you to restore the system more quickly than
reinstalling an OS and copying files.
Don’t get caught up on the term “disaster” and
believe it has to be a major incident. A disaster can
be your entire network crashes and your employees can no longer work for the
day (or longer). With a disaster recovery plan, your employees can continue to
work by using the mirrored system. With your employees set, your IT works on
fixing the problem with the original network.
We Are Here to Help
It is never too early to begin planning for
the inevitable data loss your company will one day encounter. We hope this
summary has been helpful and that you remember we are here to help in our
community. Call on us any time.