IT Disaster Recovery Planning

You need a comprehensive approach to resuming business after a disruptive event.

Disasters, whether in the form of natural calamities, cyberattacks, or technical failures, can strike at any moment, leaving unprepared businesses in turmoil.

The statistics paint a stark picture. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 25% of small businesses never reopen their doors following a disaster. This highlights the critical need for a robust disaster recovery strategy to ensure business continuity and resilience.

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) has emerged as a vital solution for businesses of all sizes, offering a way to replicate and host physical or virtual servers to a third party’s location to provide failover in the event of a man-made or natural catastrophe. Before we delve deeper into how DRaaS and disaster recovery planning can safeguard your business, let’s not forget that Sovran is here to guide you through your disaster recovery journey.

Discuss your options with the Sovran team at (651) 686-0515 or fill out our contact form.

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Disaster Recovery Planning

Disaster recovery planning is a comprehensive approach that prepares businesses to respond effectively to interruptions and minimize their impact on operations. It’s not just about data backup; it encompasses a broad range of activities, including system recovery, data retrieval, and business continuity strategies. The goal is to ensure that businesses can quickly return to normal operations following a disaster.

DRaaS for Enhanced Business Continuity

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is a cloud-based solution that has gained popularity for its efficiency and cost-effectiveness. DRaaS providers offer much-needed flexibility and scalability, allowing businesses to tailor their disaster recovery plans to their specific needs without the substantial upfront investment in physical infrastructure. This model ensures that critical data and applications are backed up in a secure, off-site location, ready to be activated in the event of a disaster.

Best Practices from Leading Vendors

When it comes to implementing disaster recovery plans, it’s wise to turn to established best practices from leading vendors in the field, such as Sovran’s partners Veeam and Acronis.

Veeam

Veeam emphasizes the 3-2-1 rule in disaster recovery planning:

have at least three copies of your data;
store the copies on two different media; and,
keep one backup copy off-site.

This approach mitigates the risk of data loss by ensuring that you have multiple backups in various locations, protecting against both physical and digital threats.

Acronis

Acronis advocates for regular testing of your disaster recovery plan to ensure its effectiveness. It’s not enough to set up a plan and forget about it; businesses must conduct regular drills to identify any weaknesses or gaps.

Acronis also highlights the importance of having a clear, written plan that outlines specific steps for recovery and assigns roles and responsibilities to ensure everyone knows what to do in the event of a disaster.

Real World Disaster Recovery Statistics

The need for comprehensive disaster recovery planning is underscored by alarming statistics. According to a report by the Uptime Institute, 31% of data centers experienced a downtime incident or severe degradation in the past year, with 80% of those incidents being preventable. This underscores the importance of not only having a disaster recovery plan in place but also ensuring it’s robust and tested regularly.

Moreover, the cost of downtime is astronomical. A study by ITIC found that for 98% of organizations, a single hour of downtime costs over $100,000. For some businesses, this figure can soar into the millions, highlighting the financial implications of inadequate disaster recovery planning.