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How to leverage cloud disaster recovery in your overall IT business continuity plan
An IT business continuity plan evaluates a company’s internal and external threats and creates strategies for resolving any difficulties that may arise. Disaster recovery is an essential piece of any company’s business continuity plan. Businesses must find cost-effective, proven methods for disaster recovery – and cloud disaster recovery is growing in popularity, especially among small and midsized companies.
Why traditional disaster recovery might not be enough
Growing operational complexity – including the need for more aggressive RTOs and more frequent and lower-cost testing – is forcing IT leaders to rethink their traditional disaster recovery methods and processes. In many cases, these traditional methods include backing up data and shipping it off to a secure offsite location, which is actually only data protection. True disaster recovery also involves systems, such as hardware and software, etc., as well as the people, processes and tools necessary to recover the data.
Furthermore, recent disasters and ransomware attacks have revealed gaps in many companies’ disaster recovery plans, therefore exposing the need to deploy a variety of solutions. Depending on their size and goals, different companies will have different disaster recovery needs. For example, smaller companies typically cannot afford to duplicate their production environment in an offsite recovery environment – it’s expensive enough to build out the production environment! What’s nice about cloud-based disaster recovery is that it can be THE disaster recovery plan.
Why consider the cloud for disaster recovery?
Many companies – both large and small – are considering moving away from “do-it-yourself” disaster recovery solutions that involve building out secondary recovery infrastructure in a recovery data center and exploring cloud-based options for several reasons.
First, purchasing the infrastructure for the recovery environment (it works best if the recovery environment mirrors the production environment) requires significant capital expenditures. Converting CapEx to OpEx over time makes for easier cost control, especially for those companies with tight CapEx budgets.
Second, cloud disaster recovery allows IT workloads to be replicated from virtual or physical environments. Out-tasking disaster recovery management ensures that your key workloads are protected – and the disaster recovery process is tuned to your business priorities and compliance needs while also allowing for more time to be freed up for your company’s IT staff.
Finally, cloud disaster recovery is flexible and scalable; it allows a business to replicate business-critical information to the cloud environment either as a primary point of execution or as a backup for physical server systems. In most cases, the right disaster recovery provider can offer you better RTOs and RPOs than your company could provide on its own in-house.
Be sure to reach out to 11:11’s data recovery specialists to start a conversation about how we might develop a tailored solution for your business’ recovery preparedness needs.
