Disaster Recovery: Why It's Important and How to Implement It

The increase in cloud adoption has given small and medium businesses (SMBs) a chance to compete with bigger names like never before. This means that SMBs should be looking at disaster recovery just as their larger competitors do. Unplanned downtime or a network outage can mean big losses, and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) can help mitigate the costs.

The Importance of Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery acts as a failsafe to protect businesses against natural and man-made disasters through the use of third parties hosting a physical or virtual copy of data. Businesses should not only have a good DR plan in place, but should also test this plan and ensure that it enables the business to recover from a disaster as soon as possible.

Using DRaaS

Analyst firm Gartner has predicted a rise in spending on disaster recovery, up to $5.7 billion by 2018. This rise will likely be spearheaded by SMBs, which can’t afford to spend large amounts of money on dedicated off-site recovery solutions. DRaaS offers many benefits in addition to cost efficiency:

• Reduction in operational complexity

• Scalability

• Security

• Speed

However, many IT professionals are concerned about putting their trust in a cloud infrastructure, uncontrollable costs, and losing control and visibility. When moving to DRaaS, businesses should ensure that they’re choosing the right vendor and the right solution in order to ease these concerns.

Three Steps for Implementation

Businesses should take the time to decide what their goals are, then follow the following steps to draw up a plan of how to meet them.

Once a vendor is chosen, businesses should determine which operations are most vital in order to focus on protecting those first. Areas to focus on when choosing a plan can include planned downtime, security, and storage. Businesses should also factor in what their employees would need to do in the event of unplanned downtime, including any alternative systems they will need to access. Finally, once a plan has been chosen and implemented, businesses should ensure that everything is up to date and test the disaster recovery system periodically to know that everything is working as it should.

While no business wants to have to use a recovery system in the event of a disaster, it’s important that organizations of all sizes have a plan in place just in case something happens. Not only will this save the business money, but being prepared beforehand — both by prioritizing vital operations and ensuring their DRaaS solution suits their business needs — means operations will be back up and running as soon as possible.