Ideally, every company would prefer a smooth business day, every day. A service outage could affect productivity, client communication, in-company communication, and your company’s bottom line. In situations where an individual hard drive holds the only copy of critical data, anything from cyber threats to natural disasters can cause major loss throughout your company. The same applies if your company has a remote disaster recovery site which also has the strong negatives of costly maintenance and support.
Cloud Disaster Recovery (Cloud DR) is a cloud computing service that uses a cloud-based platform to backup, store and recover data. This is an on-demand, personalized and highly flexible service that efficiently recovers data regardless of the workload. With this service your company no longer needs an off-premises recovery site and disaster recovery can be completed in minutes compared to hours. A well-executed, properly developed Cloud Disaster Recovery Plan can save any organization’s bottom line and their data through any kind of situation and so much more.
The most important benefit of Cloud DR is that your data remains secure regardless of cyber threats, human-error, computer-error, or natural disaster. In addition to this benefit, Cloud DR also offers some incredible positives compared to traditional disaster recovery efforts.
Have the ability to increase or decrease your data storage abilities with ease. Cloud DR grows with your company to ensure that, regardless of workload size or users, your important data is safe and easily accessible company-wide.
Switching to a cloud based disaster recovery method can be completed without the confusion of complex software and training. The service is based on simplified management while offering consistency and support.
Avoid local emergencies or being limited to where your data is stored by utilizing the option to store in multiple geographical locations. The cloud still gets your data offsite but can be used from anywhere without being tied down to physical infrastructure.
Cloud solutions offer non-disruptive monitoring and management of disaster recovery efforts. Have the ability to access your information and cut data loss regardless of local emergencies, hardware issues or any cyber security threats.
With cloud solutions applying pay-as-you-grow models your company can align costs with your specific requirements to meet your recovery needs. Cloud DR also cuts the costs of maintenance and IT support that are associated with physical hard drives or disaster recovery sites.
Traditional disaster recovery sites may have provided protection against cyber security or internal threats but unlike Cloud DR they seldomly protected against disasters such as fires, floods, earthquakes, lightning, extreme heat, or tornadoes.
When creating a Cloud Disaster Recovery Plan there are several steps to engage. Step one is understanding your infrastructure and identifying risks. Step two is conducting an impact analysis that covers what would happen if any disaster struck and how long it would take to restore and recover. These are the parameters referred to as Recovery Time Objective (RTO) which is how long you can be offline before it affects operations and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) which is the amount of time a business can go with data loss. Step three is to create a disaster plan based on these parameters. Step four is to pick the right cloud provider and build cloud infrastructure. Step five is testing your disaster plan frequently to ensure data security.
All in all, the main goal of Cloud DR is by using the right combination of strategies and services that your company’s valuable resources, data and client information remain protected and can be recovered with ease. Be able to keep efficiency, productivity, and your profit at top efficiency by moving past the biggest concern of keeping your data safe. Switch from traditional disaster recovery methods and move on to more secure, automated, off-site services.
