When a disaster strikes your business, the consequences are dire. Production shuts down. Employees are unable to perform their duties. Requests from clients and customers go unfulfilled. Vital data gets lost. Some companies never recover.
Disaster recovery experts at Zerto estimate that downtime from a disaster impacts 65% of both a company’s sales and its employee productivity. These losses are a major blow to your company’s bottom line.
Companies need to heed the warning signs that their current disaster recovery plan may not be adequate.
Here’s a list of 5 disaster recovery problems to watch out for:
1) Large RPO and RTO Windows
Being able to recover from a disaster is key, but how quickly and completely are you able to recover? Recovery time objectives (RTOs) that are extremely slow mean more costly downtime for your business. Hours and even days of downtime can cripple your company and damage your reputation with customers.
Huge recovery point objective (RPO) windows mean you are losing valuable data. Every hour between the time data is generated and backed up increases the amount of information you will lose during an outage.
2) Infrequent Testing
Some companies view their disaster recovery as a set-and-forget prevention tactic. But when a natural disaster hits, it’s the wrong time to find out that your disaster recovery plan doesn’t work. If your company is only testing its disaster recovery plan once or twice a year, you may be in trouble.
3) Lack of Geographical Diversity
When your company partners with a local disaster recovery provider, you invest in the community. But what if the provider is affected by the same natural disaster or outage that affects your company? Natural disasters such as floods, blizzards, and hurricanes can affect large areas, robbing you of backup and recovery resources.
4) Reliance on On-premises Backup
If a natural disaster, an equipment failure, or an outage hits your company, any backup files you keep on-site will become inaccessible. Maintaining on-premises backup also makes your company vulnerable to the latest ransomware attacks. Ransomware has evolved to the point where it automatically deletes any on-site backup files in addition to encrypting the original files.
5) Absence of a Formal Plan
Having a formal disaster recovery plan means more than simply having backup and recovery resources in place. The minutes and hours after a disaster is not the ideal time to “fly by the seat of one’s pants,” or improvise a course of action.
Your company needs to understand which data and applications are mission-critical. Steps to maintain business continuity after a traumatic incident need to be planned and documented. A risk assessment should be conducted, and specific RTOs and RPOs should be established.
Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
If these warning signs look familiar, you need to start exploring new disaster recovery options. Cloud-based disaster recovery could be the solution to all your disaster recovery problems.
Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) delivers fast RTOs and narrow RPO windows through instant failover. Cloud providers offer the geographical diversity that your company needs to achieve peace of mind.
FirstLight partners with Zerto to provide robust disaster recovery in the cloud. Our DRaaS combines award-winning replication and recovery software with our extensive and reliable fiber optic network. Continuous replication prevents data loss. We also offer free testing so you know your disaster recovery solution always works.
Our DRaaS is supported by the largest fiber optic network in the New England region, offering the geographical diversity that your company needs to recover quickly after a disaster.
Not sure if your disaster recovery has what it takes? Talk to the DRaaS experts at FirstLight.
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