Your business relies every day on critical data, applications, and operations. What would you do if these things were suddenly interrupted or lost? No matter the size of your business, when your systems stop working, so do your business and employees. And this can put your business at risk. That is why you can no longer ignore data backup and disaster recovery.
According to a 2019 Cloud Radar study, over half of the companies need more than 1 hour to recover a crashed application, costing over $10,000 for every hour of downtime. Of course, the cost per hour will depend on the size of your company but no matter the price, we’re pretty sure you don’t want to pay for it.
Additionally, according to IDC, 93% of businesses have experienced a tech-related disruption in the past two years. On top of costing money, it also impacted employee overtime and productivity and in some cases, it led to the loss of customers.
Consequently, incidents do happen and it is very difficult to predict when they will. Whether it is a hardware failure, a cyber attack or a natural disaster, you need to anticipate how to avoid or quickly recover from business disruption.
Before we dive into the heart of the topic, let’s start with some definitions as there is often some misunderstanding about Disaster Recovery (DR) and data backup
Disaster Recovery (DR): Disaster Recovery is a component of security planning and enables organizations to maintain and restore data, hardware, software, networking equipment, power and connectivity when the primary environment is unavailable.
Backup: Data backup is the process of saving business information to a different and secure location (on-site or off-site) so that if the data is lost or damaged, you can retrieve it when you need it.
Disaster Recovery and Data backup go hand in hand to support business continuity and are the foundation of a solid IT security strategy.
As IT environments grow more complex, you’re more exposed to system failures, IT outage and cybercrime. These can cause irreversible damages that go beyond the recovery cost and creating a recovery plan to restore data and avoid business disruption is no longer an option.
Below Are 6 Reasons Why Backup And Disaster Recovery Plan Should Not Be Ignored:
1. Threats Are Everywhere
Where there is data, there are threats and being online has increased the number of dangers.
Indeed, cyber-attacks are growing and according to Cloud Radar, there is a hacker attack every 39 seconds. Furthermore, 43% of cyber attacks now target companies with 250 employees or fewer. So no matter the size of your business, the chances to be hit by a scammer are high.
A cyber attack can have dire consequences on your business such as holding your data hostage and causing important losses so, recovering from a cyber attack should be included in your recovery plan to keep your data safe and accessible at all times.
2. IT Outages Are More Common than You Think
When we think of IT outages, we often think about extreme incidents such as hurricanes, earthquakes or terrorist attacks. However, the main causes of outage in the US and Canada are due to human error, usage spikes, and infrastructure hardware failures.
According to a 2019 IT Outage Impact Study, 96% of global IT decision-makers surveyed had experienced at least one outage in the past three years and 95% of organizations experienced at least one brownout in the past three years.
Consequently, you’d better be prepared for any type of IT outage and proactively plan for it. It’s better to be safe than sorry.
3. Data Loss Can Be Disastrous
Data is everywhere and it is growing exponentially every year. It is considered as the world’s most valuable resource and is now part of any business strategy.
Yet, less than 10% of companies back up their data every day.
According to recent studies, here is how data loss can negatively impact your business:
- 94% of businesses don’t survive after a major data loss incident – – 43% never reopen and 51% close within two years. (University of Texas)
- 70% of small businesses that experience a major data loss go out of business within a year. (DTI/Price Waterhouse Coopers)
- 20% of companies who experienced data loss from outages said it cost them between $50,000 and $5 million (Disaster Recovery Preparedness Benchmark Survey)
4. Productivity Loss Is Also Expensive
On top of the cost to recover from IT downtime, a business will also lose approximately 545 hours of employee productivity (The Costs of IT Downtime & Other Computer Downtime Statistics). Besides, businesses spend on average 200 minutes to fix a downtime related issue. An IT downtime can also undermine employee’s morale and hence their work so you do not want to underestimate the impact this can have on your business productivity.
5. Compliance and Regulations Require it
Even though regulations don’t say much about disaster recovery plans, they talk about having a business “continuity” or “contingency” plan (BCP).
Compliance cares about providing accountability and assurance regarding data protection, confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Consequently, a disaster recovery plan is a core part of regulatory compliance and should not be skipped.
6. Reputation Damage is Hard to Fix
The average consumer expects to have access to your business 24/7 and the digital revolution has made them increasingly more demanding and less forgiving.
Thus, unexpected downtime or data loss can lead to serious reputation damage and acquiring new customers or re-acquiring them is more expensive than retaining them.
A disaster recovery plan can help you keep your reputation or at least save the day when an incident occurs and therefore will help you remain competitive.
At some point, every business faces the risk of experiencing an IT disaster whether it is a minor disruption or a larger incident. A robust Disaster Recovery plan will ensure that your data and applications remain accessible and will mitigate the impact of the business interruption if any.
However, too many businesses are still ill-prepared when an IT disaster occurs even though easy backup solutions are available. Microsoft Azure offers two robust, yet simple solutions. One for data backup and the other for full disaster recovery.
Azure Backup: Azure Backup is built into the Azure platform which makes it easy to use. Even though it is cloud-native, you can use it both in the cloud or on-premise to keep your data safe. Azure Backup can be configured in one click and will easily backup and restore your entire virtual machines, files and folders, Exchange, SharePoint, SQL database and Azure files.
In addition, it will eliminate infrastructure costs and management overhead which makes it incredibly cost-effective. Azure backup can also be used to provision clones of production environments for testing/validation, and also for easy zero impacting test restore validation.
Azure Site Recovery: Azure Site Recovery is a disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solution that can be used both in cloud and hybrid cloud architectures. The solution allows you to replicate an Azure virtual machine, Hyper-V, VMWare and physical to a different Azure region directly from the Azure portal. The solution also offers DR failover for data replication, workload migration, and recovery orchestration. You can also complete scheduled zero impact test DR failovers without impacting production workloads, it can also be used to quickly and easily bring servers online in an isolated Azure network for dev/test validation, prior to rolling out to production.
Also for any business’s that are already heavily invested with an existing backup solution such as VEEAM or Commvault, these can also leverage Azure storage and resources. This provides an easy extension of existing environments to send and store backup copies offsite, all leveraging the lower cost Azure storage. They can also be used to move older backups offsite to free up on premises expensive storage, and archive in Azure storage.
Contact us now if you want to learn more about how Softlanding can help with your Backup and Disaster Recovery strategy.
Written By:
Caroline Blivet
As Softlanding's Marketing Lead, Caroline and is responsible for driving lead generation, developing a go-to-market strategy and, delivering marketing campaigns. Outside of work, Caroline enjoys hiking the beautiful trails of British Columbia.
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