Making a case for data not disaster recovery

April 13, 2021

When it comes to DR think Data not Disaster

It’s rare to find an organisation with a comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) solution that protects fully against loss of revenue, penalties and fines, along with the potential for reputational damage due to data loss or business interruption.

So many pressures impact senior management teams during the current turbulent times, with revenue, business development, remote working and people matters of primary concern, it is little wonder perhaps that disaster recovery has taken something of a backward step.

People are generally risk averse and will pay to mitigate risk, especially when it’s their own money to protect their own assets. But when it’s the business’ money, people are likely to accept more risk, which helps explain why some believe their company’s DR solution, is good enough.

It is unlikely to be good enough unless all business processes have been mapped to all supporting applications and systems so the DR solution protects not just isolated applications, but the whole business, in its entirety.

Testing your DR plan makes it real

The recovery process must be tested fully, with end user and application stakeholder involvement. If an organisation does actually instigate a test of its DR plan, the chances are it will be a bit half-hearted and will rarely replicate the stressful conditions of a genuine need.

Testing the plan as realistically as possible is critical to improving the plan and indeed the solution. It might indicate the existing plan contains deficiencies or that changes in the IT systems are necessary to facilitate an efficient backup and recovery plan.

The time it takes to recover can have serious consequences for the organisation. According to The Ultimate Guide to Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, 93 percent of businesses that suffer a major data disaster without an adequate disaster recovery plan, fail within one year.

If you’re part of a supply chain, working to critical SLA, the potential cost of missing deliveries and disrupting supply because of extended downtown, could be both significant and terminal to the continuation of the business.

Even with the impact of COVID-19 on the day-to-day ability of companies to operate effectively bringing the efforts of their IT teams into sharp focus, those same teams often struggle to persuade the C-suite that money spent on the best DR solutions, is money well spent.

Forget disaster and think mundane

One novel approach when making the case for an improved disaster recovery position, like our DRaaS solution, might be to switch the word disaster for data.

The word disaster immediately conjures up images of those rare events that fill the news headlines, like floods, fires, acts of terrorism and serious power outages like those that plagued London in 2018 and 2019.

In reality, the problems likely to require a recovery plan to be instigated will be less exciting and newsworthy, like human error or system failure although a breach and theft or ransom will still attract unwanted attention – especially if the perpetrator is an employee.

A DRaaS solution shouldn’t be considered in isolation but in tandem with a Backup as a Service solution (BaaS) to form an important part of any organisation’s business continuity planning.

Not every lost or corrupted file needs to trigger a full disaster recovery scenario, when a simple locate and replace exercise from the most recent backup will do.

A plan to recover the firm’s data when compromised by cyber-criminals, sounds more important than spending money on something that protects against floods and fires of a biblical nature that few senior manager will believe are an event likely to cause an issue in the UK.

Let’s build a better Cloud together to deliver the performance, flexibility and security you need to transform your organisation and drive it forward. Get in touch by calling us today on 020 7392 8886, so you can discover the Dataquest difference.