Authored by Nikhil Korgaonkar, Regional Director - India & SAARC, Arcserve
Business continuity is a serious concern for organizations, especially when there is a rising numbers of cyber threats each day, and due to the imbalance caused by the recent pandemic.
Be it human-initiated disasters or natural ones, the need to have a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) solutions is critical for any organization. It is a preventive approach to assume that disasters, and pandemics, causing cyber damage may be actually inevitable. Ransomware attack, a prominent cyberattack tool which most organizations are apprehensive about is actually increasing in numbers. What can be prevented is the stretch of the downtime, which the businesses may suffer as a consequence to any disaster.
Downtime is highly damaging for an organization. When data loss occurs, expenses go beyond basic recovery costs.
According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute. As there are many different businesses operating, downtime at the low end, can be as much as $140,000 per hour, $300,000 per hour on average, and as much as $540,000 per hour at the higher end. 98% of organizations say a single hour of downtime costs over $100,000. 81% of respondents indicated that 60 minutes of downtime costs their business over $300,000. 33% of those enterprises reported that one hour of downtime costs their firms $1-5 million.
Hence, downtime can be safely called an organizations' nightmare. Here are some of the major pain-areas that results due to the downtime:
Invariably, the company experiences a loss in productivity and revenue as well. This kind of risk is important enough to get executive-level attention, and it has spurred IT leaders to go beyond traditional backup and recovery to seek out new methods that can, perhaps, enable them to avoid a "logical" disaster altogether.
Thus, it is vital for organizations to have clarity about BCDR and cybersecurity plans, which are two different concepts but intertwined together.
While talking data backup, it is about making a duplicate copy (or copies) of the data. This is something most of us have already experienced on our cell phones. Anyone using a smartphone today also uses different Instant Messenger (IM) applications. These IM apps usually have a data backup setting, where the app takes a backup of all the files and conversations, to an email account drive. This backup is usually taken, during the time when we are not using the app, like while we are asleep. Backup is taken in case we accidentally delete or uninstall the app, the device gets corrupt or damaged, and we can always restore the backup data in the future. This is a simple use-case scenario of disaster recovery.
Again, certain data is more critical than the rest. For example, in a phone, the contact numbers are usually the most critical data than most other data files. Hence, this data must be protected and stored in the cloud, in case the device gets damaged or lost. This is an individual case. In case of enterprises, there must be specific plans on a course of action for losing critical-data due to a man-made disaster, or an act of God. Organizations must prioritize or grade their data according to its criticality during any emergency. Key pieces of information that are commonly stored by businesses be that employee records, customer details, loyalty schemes, transactions, or data collection, needs to be protected.
Disaster recovery is a set of plans and strategies that are in place for swift re-establishing the access to applications, data, and IT resources post a mishap or an outage. Disaster recovery sites are the exact replica of data servers. In case a disaster of any nature strikes and the connection between the networks is lost, disaster recovery plan can switch over to a secondary set of servers and storage systems until the primary data center is functioning back.
Factors to be acknowledged:
While choosing for the best solutions for both data backup and disaster recovery, organizations can have the below factor considered:
It is understandable how critical both data backup and disaster recovery is for any organization today. Retrieving lost data should not be a time-consuming affair, as this would mean loss of business hours, and delay in delivering services. Similarly, disaster recovery should help the organizations to get back fast to work, or otherwise this may lead to loss of customers and always impact business value. Alone a data backup plan cannot help when it comes to disaster recovery, thus both are equally important.