How Long Are You Willing to Wait to Recover After a Disaster?

By Doyenz Guest Blog 2

stop watch

“The general impression in the industry is that downtime only impacts big companies and therefore, fast recovery and DR are somehow the exclusive domain of large enterprises. This cannot be further from the truth,” explains Arun Taneja, Consulting Analyst, Taneja Group, “While it might cost less in absolute dollars, the relative impact of downtime on a smaller company is exactly the same as on larger businesses.”

To help protect your business, every owner should develop a DR plan that takes advantage of advancements in cloud computing. In this infographic, we’ve identified four different areas where the cloud can improve recovery time objectives (RTO); these include immediate recover, recovery in minutes, recovery in hours, and recovery in days. Depending on your business RTO needs, there are different time frames for gaining access to applications and data without significant impact.

Key Considerations

Whether it is an instant recovery or days before recovery is achieved, every business needs to know how much time they are willing to give up if a disaster strikes. For those businesses that are in need of instant recovery, continuous data protection or high availability is a critical standard for their disaster recovery plan. If companies can spare a couple of days to recover their data, then they have the option to explore an online backup and cloud storage approach to their plan.

With a cloud-based DR plan, recovery can be achieved in minutes to hours. What the cloud provides from a disaster recovery perspective is substantial: in place of financing data center (hardware, software, maintenance fees) through the IT service provider, customers can subscribe to a service. Not all vendors offering disaster recovery in the cloud are alike, and with no two customers needing the same criteria many factors can come into play when choosing a solution that makes sense for the IT environment deployed to each business.

Our infographic takes a look at the different recovery times as well as shares five key tips for incorporating the cloud into your small business disaster recovery plan. These tips include the use of data encryption; the importance and incorporation of redundancy and geographic distribution, you can never be too safe when it comes to copies of your server backups; the necessity to move beyond just backup; taking the time to make sure that your plan is bullet proof by testing your plan at least once a quarter; and finally the different ways to help prevent downtime including creating replicas of your production environment in a secure virtual lab, where its software upgrades can be tested before deploying them.

Doyenz

Eric Webster is chief revenue officer of Doyenz, a provider of cloud-based disaster recovery solutions. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship. Read all Doyenz guest blogs here.