A disaster recovery strategy should help your business recover your entire infrastructure or a part of it in the event of data corruption, service disruptions or a disaster. Being able to backup and restore your data (data replication) is crucial to minimize downtime and avoid excremental costs due to being un-operational. Incorporating the cloud into your disaster recovery strategy helps deliver fast recovery time and multi-site protection that provides a virtual approach to DR. Cloud hosting for your business applications allows your organization to maintain or quickly resume critical functions within those applications following a disaster or disruption and should be a part of any disaster recovery plan.
What are the major benefits of having the Cloud as a part of your Disaster Recovery Strategy?
- Faster Recovery Times
Data is securely transferred and continuously backed up. The frequency of automatic backups in the cloud allows companies to recover from disruptions quickly. Efficient business technology tools provide efficient monitoring to ensure minimal downtime.
- A Hybrid Solution
You can create a hybrid cloud solution in your IT environment. Whether you are looking to host your services, endpoint devices, CRM, ERP Software, Accounting Software or other business applications; you can decide. As a business you can decide the best on-premise, off-premise and cloud solution that is the best fit for your business.
- Data Replication for Added Security
When hosting your applications and data in the cloud, the cloud environment should have multi-site availability. Multi-site availability provides a path of data replication between data centers at different locations, delivering an added security measure and faster backup time.
- Cost Efficiency
The most obvious cost saving measure is that there is limited downtime in the event of disruptions or if a disaster strikes. Whether you experience a catastrophe such as an email phishing scam or data breach or you experience a natural disaster such as a hurricane; your data in the cloud will be accessible – limiting operational downtime.
When Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012, one of our long-term customers, Halifax Security, was majorly impacted. Their business operations were drastically affected. To help them get up and running as quickly as possible, we moved their on-premise servers to our facility as a temporary measure. The company then decided it was time to move to the cloud to prevent such events from happening again.
“Moving to the cloud gave me peace of mind for our computing environment,” stated Peter Rody, CFO of Halifax Security. “I had complete confidence in the team. This was a strategic long-term plan for our organization, as well as a storm fix”.
Your Backup and Recovery model should allow you to be able to seamlessly recover data or implement a failover in the event of a catastrophe. With the cloud you gain a lot of operational business benefits as well as security for data. Not only can you protect your workloads, but the cloud is easily scalable to meet the demands of your business.
Disruptions and disaster can strike at any time. Will your business be ready to react and get back up and running quickly? A comprehensive disaster recovery plan with cloud computing will do so and will help increase reliability and flexibility.
