Disaster recovery is the area of security planning that deals with protecting an organization from the effects of significant negative events
By Mohiuddin Khan Inamdar
Disasters- natural or man-made, can occur anytime. As IT systems are emerging as the backbone of maintenance for any organization, the importance of their upkeep has increased. Companies are slowly giving up on their manual processes and progressing towards software. This in turn increases the demand for data storage, its upkeep and recovery, without which, a company can face massive depreciation in finances, which can hamper its face value and trust.
In fact, there have been instances of companies closing down due to lack of an efficient recovery plan. As the cases of companies being bankrupt due to unprecedented disasters are on a rise, the importance of Disaster Recovery is now slowly dawning on the market.
Some disasters may affect only an individual, say hard drive crashes, problem with system software and so on. While the others have the power to affect the overall working of an organization,on a scale severe enough to drive it to bankruptcy. Occurrence of natural disasters such as power outages, floods, fires, storms, equipment failure, sabotage, terrorism, or even epidemic illness can trigger a hindrance to organizational progress. Even though immediate emergence causes small scale disruptions, recovery is what causes a setback, owing to its time consuming nature.
In today’s scenario, it would not be wrong to say that the market value of the company depends upon its efficiency and swiftness to recover from any unparalleled catastrophe. Market studies have highlighted that in the past two years, over 50 percent of businesses experienced an unforeseen interruption, and as a result, a vast majority (81%) of these businesses had to be shut. As stats suggest,80 percent of businesses suffering a major disaster go out of business in three years, while 40 percent of businesses that experience a critical IT failure shut down within one year of the failure. In the case of suffering a fire, 44 percent of enterprises fail to reopen and 33 percent of those that resume, fail to survive beyond 3 years.
All about Disaster recovery and Disaster Recovery as a Service(DRaaS) cloud
“Disaster recovery is the area of security planning that deals with protecting an organization from the effects of significant negative events”
Organizations often overlook the repercussions a disaster can have on their business. This often leads to unpreparedness at the time a disaster strikes. Therefore, a disaster recovery plan prepared well in advance, helps to concoct for future difficulties and upheavals. It also instils faith within the clients and maintains goodwill, highlighting a message of reliability amongst new target audience.
Traditionally, a disaster recovery plan documents policies, procedures and actions to limit the disruption to an organization, in the wake of a disaster. A blue- print prepared in- advance with the recovery steps outlined, helps the organization save a lot of time and stress.
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is the replication and hosting of physical or virtual servers by a third-party to provide fail over in the event of a man-made or natural catastrophe.
Currently, more and more companies across sectors, locally and globally are increasingly using DRaaS to streamline internal and external processes. The global research firm Markets and Markets predict a compounded annual growth in the DRaaS market of 55.2% until 2018. However, before utilizing the cloud, service provider security practices must be evaluated, including compliance with BCI/PCI standards, encryption of data at rest and in transit, and thorough data center monitoring and employee assessment.
How can your business gain from DRaaS?
Having DRaaS helps in maintaining the efficiency of the recovery system by controlling recovery time.
• Better functionality for less cost: DRaaS costings are nominal, with the provider taking money for the services offered. Since services can be availed depending upon the preferences of the organization, the expense is restricted to the upkeep of DRaaS and is flexible.
• Easier, frequent, and less expensive testing: Testing a Traditional DR plan is an organization’s obligation, whereas, in case of DRaaS, organization funds the services while the accountability for the DRaaS goes to the provider. This cuts out the cost of setting up a recovery centre and involving IT professionals. Time is also reduced, as DRaaS comes to aid the organization, pretested.
• More flexible and enables chargeback: DRaaS gives scope for all levels of businesses to evolve according to their dynamic business needs.Since no separate Recovery Centre is required to be built, DRaaS can be hosted on any portable device, which adds to the amenity of the service.
• Pay-as-you-go: DRaaS customers pay per protected service, which operationalizes DR spending. This feature makes it easy to add protected servers or storage.
Organizations need to adapt to the dynamic odds in trade. It is now vital to take advantage of newer cloud resources such as DRaaS. This ensures that while making the most of the data explosion, we are also powerful enough to provide assistance when growth in this data presents new challenges at new range of levels.
The author is Sr. Solutions Architect at Xavient Information Systems.