When disaster strikes—whether it’s a natural catastrophe, a cyberattack, or a simple power outage—your job is to keep things up and running. But where do you even start? Do you need a backup solution, a disaster recovery (DR) solution, or a bit of both?
In a recent article, Gartner analyst Michael Hoeck predicted that by 2028, 75% of enterprises will prioritize backing up their SaaS applications, a significant increase from just 15% in 2024. This shift is driven by a greater reliance on cloud applications, rising cyber threats, and growing data volumes. As a result, many are realizing the need for third-party backup solutions to ensure data recovery and business continuity beyond what SaaS vendors typically provide.
“By 2028, 75% of enterprises will prioritize backup and recovery of SaaS applications as a critical requirement, up from 15% in 2024.”
– Michael Hoeck, Gartner Analyst
Building a resilient business continuity plan begins with understanding the tools and technologies available and matching them to your specific use cases. It’s about more than just keeping the lights on; it’s about ensuring your organization can weather any storm and emerge stronger on the other side.
Our new 11:11 Systems white paper breaks down the essentials of cloud-based backup and disaster recovery so you can confidently build a plan that works for your organization. Here is a brief overview.
Understanding Your Technology Options
Before you can protect your data, you need to understand the tools that are at your disposal.
Backups
Backups are copies of your virtual and physical systems, including all the data within them. Typically, these are taken daily and stored according to a retention schedule (e.g., daily for a month, monthly for a year).
While backups are great for compliance and long-term archival, they have limitations when speed is critical. Restoring a system from a backup can take hours or even days, potentially resulting in significant downtime and data loss since the last backup occurred.
Cloud-based backups offer:
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- Geographic diversity from your main site.
- Lower operational costs compared to maintaining physical infrastructure.
- Easy scalability as your data grows.
Disaster Recovery (DR)
Disaster recovery is designed to minimize downtime. It uses replication technology to create a copy of your virtual machine (VM) at a secondary location. Because this replication happens continuously or in frequent snapshots, you can fail over in seconds or minutes.
A cloud-based DR (DRaaS) solution provides:
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- Minimal data loss (low Recovery Point Objective).
- Rapid recovery times (low Recovery Time Objective).
- Elimination of the cost of a secondary data center.
Which One Do You Need?
For systems where uptime is critical to business operations and data changes rapidly (like transaction processing systems), a disaster recovery solution is the right choice. For non-critical applications or archival needs, simple backups may suffice. Many organizations adopt a hybrid approach, using DR for mission-critical workloads and backups for everything else.
Categorizing Your IT Systems
Not all systems are created equal. To build an effective plan, you must categorize your IT environment to identify which workloads are essential.
Start by creating an inventory of your systems, including on-premises applications, virtual environments, and cloud-hosted workloads. Once you have a list, determine the following for each system:
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The maximum amount of time a system can be down before it impacts the business.
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The maximum amount of data loss your organization can tolerate.
For example, your customer-facing website might need an RTO of minutes, while an internal billing tool used once a month might tolerate a few days of downtime. Stack ranking your systems by criticality helps you allocate resources effectively, ensuring your most vital operations are protected by the most robust solutions.
Building and Testing Your Plan
Once you’ve selected your technology and categorized your systems, it’s time to document the plan. Your disaster recovery plan should outline exactly what constitutes a disaster, who is authorized to declare an emergency, and the step-by-step procedures for failing over.
But a plan on paper isn’t enough. You must test it.
Failover Testing:
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- Non-disruptive tests: Verify that your replicated VMs can spin up in the cloud without impacting your live production environment.
- Live failover: Simulate a real outage to validate the entire process, though this is more intrusive.
Regular testing ensures that when a real crisis hits, your team isn’t scrambling. They are executing a practiced, proven strategy.
Secure Your Future with Cyber Resilient Solutions
Today’s threat landscape is constantly shifting, from sophisticated ransomware attacks to unpredictable weather and geopolitical events. Implementing a robust cloud-based backup and disaster recovery strategy is no longer a”nice to have”—it is a business necessity.
Protecting your mission-critical applications, data, categorizing your workloads or implementing a full-scale DRaaS solution, we can help you build cyber resilience from the ground up.
To better gauge where your organization is with Back up and Disaster Recovery download our white paper The Essential Guide to Cloud-Based Backup and Disaster Recovery to learn the five key steps that will help you drive your business continuity planning.
Don’t wait for the next disaster to strike. Start building your resilient future today.
