The IT disaster recovery sector tends to be highly reactive, rather than proactive, in nature. Businesses often neglect to prepare for disasters until they are hit full on or experience a close call. Then, suddenly, Disaster Recovery (DR) is a priority. It seems like every blizzard, hurricane, or large-scale power outage brings a new reminder that companies need to prepare for emergencies.
But what about organizations that want to be proactive? What should they be doing to prepare?
Below are five things to consider as your business plans for Disaster Recovery.
1. Speed of Response
According to the Disaster Recovery Journal, organizations are putting greater emphasis on how well their IT teams can handle the immediate response to the disaster.1 The quality of the initial reaction often dictates how smooth and efficient the rest of the recovery process is. As a result, organizations are relying more on automation—eliminating complex, manual processes of the past.
Recovery point and time objectives are becoming more stringent, pushing IT teams to retain more data and get key systems running faster than has been historically considered acceptable. When considering DR services, CIOs and IT directors should pay extra attention to, and verify provider claims about, recovery point and time objectives.
2. Resiliency
Consider recent data breaches and natural disasters. How can a company prepare against all of those threats while also staying on top of new attack vectors and vulnerabilities? Businesses are aware that they can't protect every potential weakness. This realization comes with a recognition that greater resiliency within systems can promote business continuity and reduce the impact of a disaster event in the first place.
To a great extent, becoming more resilient begins with planning. However, building hardware and infrastructure resiliency into IT systems can also help prevent an isolated disaster from escalating. For example, include managed failover or network redundancy with your broadband access, or implement an SD-WAN solution for managing branch networks remotely.
3. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
The cloud-based, Disaster Recovery as a Service market is expanding rapidly. Research from The Business Research Company states that the "DRaaS market was valued at about $3.16 billion in 2018, and is expected to grow to $11.71 billion at an annual growth rate of 38.8% through 2022."2 That growth is driven by the need to back up every-increasing amounts of data, public and private.
Cloud computing is steadily gaining momentum as a disaster recovery option. As Forbes Technology Council said recently, "With increasing threats, such as ransomware, and with the flexibility of the public cloud, companies are reconsidering their DR plans and are looking to simpler, SaaS-based products that offer on-demand recovery for less."3
4. AI and Machine Learning
New DRaaS solutions are leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for detection and proactive redress. Before a disaster—like a cyber-attack—occurs, predict learning algorithms detect threats or atypical behavior, enabling the service to automatically perform proactive recovery.4Over the next year or so, more products should come to market with these capabilities.
5. Other DRaaS Uses
Some providers are seeing customers use their Disaster Recovery as a Service solutions in new ways: for migrations and refreshing hardware cycles; and protecting applications as opposed to protecting infrastructure.5
IT teams are facing mounting pressure to automate, accelerate, and improve their disaster recovery capabilities. Cloud computing is proving vital in all of those processes, as DRaaS provides a foundation for easy failover onto backup systems, keeping business going when disaster strikes.
Fusion offers a robust, highly resilient network footprint that can ensure that organizations have the redundancy and performance they need, when they need it.
Sources:
1Disaster Recovery Journal
2The Business Research Company
3Forbes
4The Business Research Company
5TierPoint
