Leveraging Disaster Recovery Services for BCDR
October 18, 2019While there are plenty of scary statistics regarding the costs of downtime, business loss, and customer loss, any business operating on fear rather than good business planning for Business Continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) are likely making mistakes. This is often because of the complexity of developing a working BCDR strategy requires leveraging disaster recovery services.
Most businesses have a difficult time bringing together the different sources and providers needed to enact a solid BCDR plan. In fact, too few understand the nuances of what makes up a BCDR plan. While business continuity and disaster recovery are all about your business remaining operational after an adverse event, they are not the same thing.
At its most basic level, business continuity is everything the organization does to maintain the flow of products/services and restore them as quickly as possible if they are interrupted. Disaster recovery is the means a business uses to regain IT infrastructure, networking , data storage, and application access that keeps business operations up and running when any disaster takes them offline.
Organizations rely on outside sources and third-party providers to get operations back on track, which, which is where disaster recovery services come into play. A disaster recovery company can take the form of a data center provider with broad connectivity to cloud providers. They also have experts on staff to help develop a BCDR strategy and often have facility partners that enable a business to have a temporary base of operations clear when disaster strikes.
Most businesses will look to the cloud for backup, but all workloads and needs are not the same nor do they require the same speed to regain access. Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recover Time Objectives (RTO) are what determine the point that you need the stored data to start from while the latter is how fast you need it available.
Data center disaster recovery service providers can support your chosen RTO and RPO. This can be based on any chosen cloud provider to accommodate speed, costs and storage levels among other aspects.
Since disasters can be a man-made event like a malware attack or a natural disaster like a hurricane, fire or flood, disaster recovery site choices and uptime are critical factors. In either case, the workforce will often need a temporary base of operations and a backup site that are both a safe distance from the epicenter of the disaster. Disaster recovery services with the right data center provider can offer facilities for temporary workforce operation and a network of data centers to make sure data backups are far enough away from the disaster area.
As more businesses look to the cloud for BCDR flexibility, scalability, and cost options, cloud management takes on a whole new meaning. It’s easier to make decisions regarding where to place mirrored workloads and applications with multiple cloud provider options. A disaster recovery services partner with broad cloud and data center connectivity options can also simplifies redundancy choices.
This enables a failover plan with a cloud provider that mirrors specific mission-critical workloads. It also enables cost effective cloud options for private cloud options where regulatory compliance may be a factor and public cloud options for non-critical data backup that is less time sensitive.
The data center disaster recovery services provider can also bring different options to ensure the mirrored cloud site is geographically distant from the primary location. This can include options for direct and secure private connections that bypass the public internet while still meeting your high availability and lower RTO/RPO objectives. This also includes migration options that avoid network congestion and helps to reduce security threats of data in transit and at rest.
A disaster recovery company is often structured to help a business develop their BCDR plan rather than providing any or all the options needed to make the plan work. The ideal scenario would be a disaster recovery services provider capable of leveraging audit, planning, design and fulfillment options as a single point of contact. This type of partner puts the business in a better position to develop a holistic BCDR plan that is tested and proven to work for uninterrupted operations under any circumstances.