Less than a third of small businesses have a business continuity plan to protect themselves in the event of IT failure? And a third of large organizations have no contingency plans in place either.
Typically, we see an organization’s approach to Disaster Recovery (DR) dictated by one or more of the following:
- The belief that it won’t happen to them
- They don’t want to invest in a DR infrastructure that’s not needed 99.99% of the time
- They’ve been backing up data to tape for years and see no reason to change
The harsh reality is that all businesses are under significant threat from cybercriminals who can bring even those with sophisticated DR set ups to a grinding halt.
Global ransomware attacks have caused significant downtime for many well-known organizations, exposing serious flaws in their IT security. Many believe that cybercrime is the biggest threat that businesses across the globe will face with reports predicting that it will cost $6 trillion (over £4.5 trillion) per year by 2021.
The risk of fire, flood, hardware failures, human error and power outages can also result in significant downtime for businesses, curtailing productivity and impacting customer service and business reputation. Analyst group, Gartner claims that the average cost of IT downtime is approximately £4,400 per minute, a high cost to pay for situations that can be avoided.
The biggest risk we see is those businesses who think they’re protected against every eventuality when in reality they’re not. When we ask them when was the last time they tested their DR plan, the answer is usually ‘never’. Many large organizations have fallen foul to not testing for vulnerabilities in their DR plans and procedures.
- Have you ever tested your current DR plan and did it work effectively?
- Are your business-critical services and workloads protected?
- Do you feel your DR infrastructure is fit for purpose?
- What would you do if your primary systems were to fail right now?
- Could your organization benefit from cloud-based DR?
If your responses have left you questioning your current set up, or if the thought of your business-critical services being unavailable brings you out in a cold sweat, it might be time to consider Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).
DRaaS takes the risk of downtime headache away from your business, offering the replication and hosting of physical or virtual servers in the cloud by a third party to provide failover in the event of a disaster. It can replicate infrastructure, applications and data from multiple locations to the cloud, enabling full recovery.
DRaaS solutions can conform to a set of Recovery Point Objective (RPO)/Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) rules to ensure recovery from a major outage of systems is automated in an appropriate timeframe.
Disasters can happen to any business when they least expect it and none can afford to wait for disaster to strike! Be prepared for when (not if) it happens to your business.
For more information about M247 DRaaS solution, contact us today
