August 15, 2022 | By Greg Dougherty
No matter what industry you’re in or what position you hold within your company, you’ve likely heard terms like Disaster Recovery, Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service, and DRaaS thrown around the office. While you may know the terms, it’s important that you realize how crucial these terms are for any business.
So, the question you’re probably asking yourself now is, “why exactly do I need a disaster recovery plan?” The short answer is that there are countless reasons that a business needs a disaster recovery plan. Whether you’re a business owner researching disaster recovery, or a systems administrator looking to convince your management team that investing in a disaster recovery plan is essential, the topic can be intimidating just from the sheer volume of information surrounding it. Due to the nature of this intricate topic, we’ve decided to put together a list of the top 5 biggest reasons why your business needs to have a solid disaster recovery plan in place.
1. To Protect Your Company’s Data
The first and most obvious argument for having a disaster recovery plan is to safeguard your company from data loss due to disaster, whether it be man-made (human error, ransomware, etc.) or natural (hurricane, flood, fire, etc.). Take a moment and think about all of the data that drives your business; email, databases, and even Word & Excel documents. If all of this business-critical data were lost, it could potentially set your business back months, or even worse, years. In some cases, losing your data can even mean the end of the road for your business altogether. In fact, according to FEMA, roughly 40%-60% of small businesses never reopen after disaster strikes.
Having the ability to restore files and folders is arguably the most fundamental feature of any solid disaster recovery plan. Employing a DR strategy that allows you to restore data into your systems and environment can help ensure that a single failure or disaster doesn’t cripple your business, or worse, completely destroy it.
2. To Protect Your Customers’ Data
In most cases, your company’s data isn’t the only data that needs protecting. More than likely, you have customers and clients who rely on you to keep their data and information safe. If you lose your clients’ data, not only does this harm your business operations but it could completely tarnish your reputation. An outage or service interruption is one thing, but having to tell customers that their data is gone can be truly debilitating for your business.
Many industries have some form of standard or requirement in place to ensure that clients’ data remains protected from loss in the event of a disaster. This is especially true in the healthcare sector. As a matter of fact, having a comprehensive disaster recovery plan is actually a requirement to ensure compliance with HIPAA regulations.
Even if your company isn’t legally obligated to safeguard clients’ data if disaster strikes, it’s certainly in your company’s best interest to do so.
3. To Ensure Business Continuity
Business continuity is important for just about any business you can think of. It’s as simple as this: how long can your business stand to not be productive? This will vary from business to business, but the sooner you can get your environment up and running will always be better. You want your business to be able to continue vital operations with limited interruption under normal circumstances, so why not have the same aspirations in the case of a disaster? Modern DRaaS solutions make this a reality instead of a dream.
4. To Uphold The “3-2-1” Backups Rule
The “3-2-1 rule” is the golden rule of data backups, and any disaster recovery plan worth its salt incorporates it. It states that you should have three copies of your data, two of which are stored on different types of media, and one copy held off-site. A solid disaster recovery plan can help you tackle this by making sure copies of data are stored off-site with a service provider, and even leverage virtual tape media to meet all the requirements of the 3-2-1 rule. Having this data redundancy helps ensure that no matter what disaster scenario is thrown at you, you’ll have working backups.
5. To Inspire Confidence
Finally, we have confidence. Just like any other segment of your business you place confidence in, be it a point-of-sale system or payroll software; you need to be confident in your business’ ability to weather any disaster scenario. Don’t just think of your disaster recovery plan as a list of checkboxes but rather as a runbook. A good disaster recovery plan lays out what steps need to be conducted and by whom, so there is a clear path forward during uncertainty. At the end of the day, a disaster recovery plan should not merely be a plan to counter disaster, it should be a force multiplier in the confidence you have in your business to run smoothly and efficiently no matter what.
While the 5 aforementioned reasons are among the most important arguments for implementing a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy, there really is an endless list of reasons why every business should have a solid DR plan.
Want to learn how Opti9’s DRaaS solutions can complete your organization’s disaster recovery plan? Send us a message at sales@Opti9.com or give us a call at 1-866-Opti9-1 (1-866-932-2471) and speak to an expert today!