12-27-21 | Blog Post
At first sight, Disaster Recovery Planning may seem like expensive funding for DR, options may seem limited. Skimping on a Disaster Recovery plan, however, can lead to severe consequences when disaster does strike.
The reality of disaster recovery is that there is an extremely high ROI when cloud-based backup and disaster recovery is utilized. Maximizing the return of your DR plan starts in the Cloud with disaster recovery delivered as a service (DRaaS). The reason? Cloud technologies are customizable and scalable, meaning you pay for what you need, not what you don’t need. To fully maximize the return on your DR plan, let’s first consider the costs associated with building a DR plan yourself.
Protecting data is a huge part of disaster recovery. Your business may become significantly hindered if it loses access to operation-sensitive data. When disaster strikes, losing access to contacts, files, networks, and other data can be catastrophic. Hours, even minutes of downtime can result in thousands of dollars in losses (lost business, lost customers, lost productivity, etc).
Consider the other costs associated with protecting data from disaster. Backing up and replicating data to an offsite repository is expensive, exhausting human and capital resources. With DR best practices in mind, getting data 500 miles off-site requires transportation costs, warehouse costs, etc if your backups are physical. If your data backups are virtual, you’ll have to shoulder the costs of building a data center off-premise, including property costs, the cost of power to servers that store the backups, and an IT team who manages it all.
Needless to say, there are several costs that go into protecting data, one of many pieces to the disaster recovery puzzle. All of these costs are normally upfront, capital expenditures. You might have a good idea of what these costs would amount to depending on the volume of data your organization currently has and the resources it requires. Yet without any DR plan in place, losses could be permanent (meaning permanent closure or bankruptcy). And remember, DR planning is more than just preparation for natural disasters; it encompasses human error disaster, cyber-attacks, and more.
Investing in a cloud-based disaster recovery strategy means 99.99% uptime. It means if your system does go down, your data can be easily restored or your operations can quickly fail over to another location. Your employees can stay online and remain productive remotely when working from the office is not an option. It also means avoiding the costs of building out a backup and recovery environment yourself. You don’t need an IT team to protect your organization from disaster thanks to cloud-based disaster recovery. DRaaS can also be implemented today whereas keeping DR in-house can take months to implement. Cloud-based solutions can help your business prepare for all types of disasters, including cyber-security attacks, human error, and natural disasters. And, for businesses concerned about compliance in regard to a cloud-based DR plan, our cloud solutions are all HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and SOC 2 Type 1 compliant.
Maximizing the return on a cloud-based disaster recovery plan will vary from organization to organization based on needs, operational processes, and security. But in almost all cases there are great cost savings and peace of mind associated with cloud-based DR. The destruction and detriment associated with disaster, as noted early, severely outweighs the costs of investing in cloud-based DR. A lackadaisical or underfunded DR plan can still result in disaster. Put simply, you hope you never need to use your DR solution but if you do it quickly pays for itself. If you don’t already have peace of mind and confidence in your DR plan, turn to Otava for Disaster Recovery as a Service.
