If you haven’t reviewed your business continuity plan (BCP) and disaster recovery solutions in a while, now might be a good time to revisit them. Depending on your location, a natural disaster can strike at any moment. Failure to implement a reliable strategy for recovering your critical business data after an IT catastrophe could set your company back hundreds of thousands if you can even execute a successful recovery at all.
The best approach for managing your disaster recovery planning is to adopt a proactive strategy for securing your digital environment. This is the surest way to prevent an IT disaster from occurring in the first place. Preparation plays a crucial role in safeguarding your networks. A reputation for reducing or eliminating unplanned downtime goes a long way in preserving the hard-earned trust of your valued customers because they know you’ll deliver results on time.
In the last three years, business owners have started prioritizing their disaster recovery and business continuity plans more than ever before. When your IT environment goes south, for whatever reason, things can quickly spiral out of control. Any given number of scenarios can arise, from a case like the Solar Winds hack to something that looks more like the shuttering of the Colonial pipeline. Savvy business leaders understand that their organizations are hardly immune to the current threat environment.
A recent Garter survey shows that over three-quarters of all respondents fell victim to at least one cyberattack in the past 24 months. Of course, these same organizations are equally concerned about the prospective security risks associated with a recession or another global health crisis. By many accounts, at least one, if not both events are due to immanently unfold in the near term.
Irrespective of the potential threat, your business must be prepared to pivot quickly when a disaster strikes. Your focus should be on developing a robust yet easy-to-interpret plan for quickly transitioning all your files to a remote access point. This approach will ensure continuous operations after an IT catastrophe. If your information security plan doesn’t incorporate a secure backup solution, such as cloud storage, an unexpected disaster or cybersecurity incident could easily translate to the permanent loss of your essential business data.
With so many businesses intent on improving their business continuity and disaster recovery plans, there is no better time to review the benefits of a cloud disaster recovery solution than now. An increasingly popular choice among business owners, cloud disaster recovery gives you remote access to all your data and files backed up on the cloud. This service represents one of the most reliable options for storing and protecting your mission-critical data offsite.
In this post, we’ll outline the primary features of cloud disaster recovery and how it might benefit your organization more than other conventional methods of preserving your business data.
What is cloud disaster recovery?
Cloud disaster recovery, or CDR, describes a cloud-based managed IT service that assists businesses in recovering their critical data after a cyber attack or major natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes strike. Business leverage these cloud storage and recovery solutions to quickly regain access to their networks from a secured digital environment as they work to restore them back to full operational normalcy.
Historically disaster recovery entailed managing a secondary physical site that housed another data center. This IT recovery solution was always costly in terms of time and resources. Cloud disaster recovery has considerably altered the traditional offsite store and security landscape by eliminating expensive and often unnecessary infrastructure requirements. As such, IT departments around the globe have increasingly benefited from the cloud after realizing faster disaster recovery times at a fraction of what the process used to cost.
How does cloud disaster recovery work?
There are multiple variables and several factors to consider when developing an effective disaster recovery plan to protect your business. This is why so many organizations have notably increased their budgets in this area over the last year. A large number of these same businesses have turned to managed IT service providers as means of ensuring continuous access to their critical information and systems after a catastrophe.
Managed service providers give you online, cloud-based disaster recovery solutions that protect the critical components of your digital operating environment while preserving essential business information. Cloud disaster recovery services replace expensive servers and software by replicating your existing server on the cloud, including any required applications and your critical business data.
One impressive feature of the cloud recovery process is that it does not require special hardware. This benefit means you can expect to expedite the average recovery time much faster than a traditional system. All your data is stored remotely in an offsite data center where you can access the information at any time and from any connected location.
Cloud vs. traditional disaster recovery: In what other ways do they differ?
If you’ve been in business for any considerable stretch of time, you’re likely familiar with the high costs and resources required to maintain a traditional disaster recovery solution. While there are benefits to traditional systems, especially if your industry is proscribed from storing information on the cloud, remote, cloud-based disaster recovery centers are almost always the better choice.
Traditional systems command businesses to acquire and maintain expensive hardware for backups and storage. Procuring and managing pricy infrastructure components adds up quickly and can drastically increase your IT overhead. These systems also require more logistics, and you should expect to pay handily in areas like backup coordination, warehouse storage, and data management.
In comparison, you can facilitate cloud disaster recovery 100% remotely, streamlining the process in ways you never could with a traditional system. For instance, Florida’s Gulf Coast supports a fast-growing population, with new businesses sprouting up all over the region. This area has always been at risk of a significant storm-related disaster, while hurricanes could be getting worse. These account for only two reasons why companies are increasingly benefiting from low-cost, remote cloud-based backups to keep their operations continuous.
Trust PCH Technologies To Help
PCH Technologies supplies businesses like yours with advanced cloud management software solutions that help migrate critical applications while preserving your essential systems and data. To learn more about developing a resilient, low-cost cloud disaster recovery plan, schedule your free discovery call online, or call us now at (856) 754-7500.