When business is so tied to the internet and the global connectivity of our products and services, disaster is in fact just one click or power disruption away. In an age rife with natural disaster and computer malware, if your business lacks a disaster recovery and business continuity plan you are simply not prepared for what may be the inevitable and eventual catastrophic loss of an application crucial to your company.
This article looks at how one cloud service provider can help businesses stay prepared in an uncertain digital world.
According to TechTarget, a disaster recovery plan “is a documented, structured approach with instructions for responding to unplanned incidents.” TechTarget defines business continuity planning as “the ability of an organization to maintain essential functions during, as well as after, a disaster has occurred.”
Your business needs both to mitigate risk and help prevent interruptions in critical functions that could affect employees, customers, and your reputation in the market. If you don’t have a business continuity and disaster recovery plan for 2018 ask yourself one question: How much money could you stand to lose if your business shut down for three days – or three weeks?
The Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA) spells it out plainly – more than 40% of all businesses fail to reopen after a disaster. For those that reopened, just 29% were still in business two years after the disaster struck. FEMA reports that businesses that lost their IT departments for nine days or longer ended up bankrupt in the next year.
These disasters can affect any size business, and they can encompass everything from malicious virus infections by hackers to natural disasters like the recent mudslides in California.
Look at some of the headlines from last year:
A disaster recovery and business continuity plan for your critical technology infrastructure must include a methodical plan for minimizing the negative effects of a technology disaster. It must also include a corporate methodology for recovering data and restoring critical business functions at every step in your business. Without these tools, your business will be at risk.
But did you realize that your cloud service provider could actually help your organization stay better prepared in the event of a crisis. Let’s look at how one provider, Microsoft Azure, provides disaster recovery and business continuity in a foolproof mix of environments designed to keep data secure.
Microsoft Azure is a cloud-based provider of services that are hosted in Microsoft data centers around the world. From cloud-driven software solutions to data storage, Azure offers web applications for businesses seeking to cut costs while improving business functions. Some of the basic services offered in the Azure suite of products include:
Azure uses cloud technology to provide these services. In layman’s terms, the cloud is simply the internet. Data flows upwards and down to your computer through routers, switches, and storage facilities hosted in a physical data center controlled and managed by Microsoft. Azure is the infrastructure that manages all of these functions. Azure is also “open” meaning it allows developers to play within the unique confines of the domain to allow hosting of software applications. The software could include something as simple as an email application, however, the benefit of Azure is that the company does not have to host their own on-premise servicers and accrue the costs of the hardware, software, and staffing to maintain it.
In the old days, data was backed up on tapes that were taken off-premise and secured. Now effective solutions must include server and application restoration, which makes the cloud an important tool in this process. Microsoft has built recovery services directly into the Azure portal so you have the control. Through the use of customizable recovery plans, Azure lets you prioritize when services get backed up and running first.
Microsoft Azure offers customers high reliability and a powerful hosting and service environment that most businesses simply cannot afford. The Microsoft Service Level Agreement (SLA) guarantees a minimum of 99.9% availability of the site recovery service.
These services are deployed across redundant technologies, which provide unparalleled security and fault tolerance. Additionally, Microsoft Azure also offers DRaaS, or disaster recovery as a service. DRaaS is particularly helpful for orchestrating how data is recovered across very complicated workloads. Azure offers customers backup, storage, virtual machines, and constant security updates to help keep data safe.
For enterprise organizations, Azure DRaaS can help with site-to-site disaster recovery applications. For smaller firms, Azure uses the cloud to effectively mitigate risk.
Azure provides disaster recovery features as part of their strategy to offer an uncompromised, resilient infrastructure to support their clients. Some of these features include:
All of these features can help protect your business from any number of disastrous scenarios, including the adverse weather events, hacker intrusion, application failure, network outages, data corruption, and much more. While these features should not take the place of the disaster recovery and business continuity planning process, they add peace of mind as part of any effort to maintain business as usual -- no matter what the business disruption occurs.
To learn more, contact IES today.