The inscription 'Data matters the most' written on this photo shows how important data is.

Why should you consider a cloud disaster recovery plan?

In today’s time, data is the biggest asset of any business. Data is moving businesses and is at the core of business success while being today’s currency. Your data is sensitive, and if you think you’re immune to any sort of mishappening? Think again.

With rapidly changing business needs, it is crucial to go an extra mile to protect your data from any kind of disaster – today and in the future. These disasters may negatively impact the revenue, productivity and even the reputation of any organization. There are different reasons that outage the business and need to be fortified against like, human error, Server Failure, Storage failure, File corruption, Hardware related disaster, Software related disaster, and Power outages. These may not sound dangerous, but they are exceedingly harmful. Regardless of the business domain, all businesses need a plan in hand to quickly bounce back to their operations and continue their services whenever an unanticipated event occurs putting the operations to a halt. Hence, it is the topmost business priority across all industries to save the most crucial and money-making asset of the business – Data.

Cloud DR (Disaster Recovery) plan is a phenomenal approach that helps in restoring your data and recovering your entire infrastructure ensuring its safety in case of a disaster. It is a document that contains a set of policies and procedures that enables the organization to reclaim its access to its applications and its data, continuing its operations post-disaster. A well-crafted IT disaster recovery plan makes sure that you are prepared for anything and everything. It should precisely address all sorts of disasters that may happen in future, be it natural disasters, being hacked, malicious coding or even an employee accidentally wiping out your entire server of critical files without being noticed by anyone until it is too late. Disasters are unpredictable and can severely impact your business causing data loss which may elevate to irreversible damage. Data Recovery services have become a necessity that protects your IT infrastructure and incorporates a suitable backup plan. A sturdy cloud DR plan can help your business to make a perfect comeback after a disaster. It provides comprehensive protection to all your crucial data and applications. The importance of disaster recovery cannot be exaggerated in this data-driven world when it comes to the significance of business success. Therefore, a disaster recovery solution and plan have become necessary for all enterprises dealing with data that they can’t afford to lose.

This picture shows the benefits of a disaster recovery plan.

A Cloud Disaster Recovery has numerous key benefits over all types of disasters that may occur:

  • Flexibility and Scalability: Cloud offers absolute flexibility of upscaling and downscaling to the companies, whenever they need to. Since it is convenient to expand the number of resources that can be backed up in the cloud just by purchasing more cloud infrastructure capacity, it has become effortless for businesses to broaden their scale. Services can be scaled exponentially as they can be upscaled and downscaled in future when required. Adding resources to cloud-based solutions does not take much time and effort whereas on-premises disaster recovery requires sufficient server capacity to ensure a high level of operational performance. Planning disaster recovery lets businesses identify and adopt solutions that are innovative and helps in reducing costs of maintenance, backups, and recovery. The disaster recovery planning process can reduce the risk of errors and streamline the entire IT process while adding flexibility and scalability.
  • Cost-effective: With cloud-based DR, there is no need to invest upfront in hardware or pay for more infrastructure than how much you use at a given time. Cloud services work as a pay-per-use model that makes the services extremely cost-effective as it helps the companies to spend consciously by consuming and paying for the resources they use as per their need. Resources may also not run at their full capacity and often be underutilized in the case of on-premises environments wherein disaster recovery plans offer various components that improve cost-efficiency including prevention, detection, and correction to reduce the risks from any disasters. Detection measures are designed in such a way that when a disaster does happen, it is identified promptly, and corrective measures are placed in a position to retrieve the lost data enabling the resumption of operations. The adoption of cloud-based data management as a part of a disaster recovery plan plays a vital role in reducing the cost of backups and maintenance.
  • Reduced Downtime: Cloud-based solutions offer your organization the capability to restore your crucial data and systems from any location. Cloud DR services can be accessed online within seconds. The physical DR only operates at the time of actual disaster wherein the cloud DR services keep a close eye on all the operations and stay prepared for any foreseen disaster promptly. Failures or downtime are not something to forgive easily when it is regarding the loss of sensitive data. Disaster recovery planning assists businesses to meet and maintain a higher quality of service at any given time. Reducing the risks that your customers face from data loss, downtime ensures that they receive better service from you throughout and after a disaster, shoring up their loyalty. To keep your data safe from any kind of disaster, it is preferred to store your data off-site.
This picture is telling about cloud disaster
  • Geographic Redundancy: It is the replication of your data in two geographically different sites in such a way if a disaster should happen, your applications can switch from one site to another. Companies use geographic redundancy to ensure that even when disasters happen, all critical applications and data can still be accessed. Cloud-based Disaster Recovery leverages the geographic redundancy features that help in spreading the backed-up resources across multiple geographic regions in order to maximize their availability, even if part of the cloud that is used, fails. Possessing more than one cloud system is often more useful in case the primary cloud workspace ever becomes non-functional. Even when everyone has functional systems, regular backups will help in keeping everything in good shape.

Thought-Sol disaster recovery service provides a true end-to-end recovery solution to keep your business up and running. Thought-Sol also manages the replication of your data and proactively monitors your recovery environment allowing you to view the health of your environment, when your data was last replicated and how prepared your recovery environment is to keep your business functioning when the disaster strikes.

Vineet Kumar

With the experience of 26 years in the IT industry, I founded Thought-Sol Infotech in 2014 with the main aim to bring meaningful change and empower businesses with advanced-reliable IT infrastructure. We provide huge diversification of infrastructure services for any and all technology-related business needs.