As the hurricane season is in full bloom and natural disasters increase, it is vital for companies to put in place disaster information plans.
Companies that do not draw up plans for the recovery of their electronic equipment and essential data require serious financial damage in an emergency.
TechNewsWorld discussed disaster preparedness with a panel of IT experts. Take a look at their recommendations - and make sure you haven’t forgotten an equally important thing that many companies forget to protect but regret later.
IDC findings
IDC’s 2018 report, titled “Status of IT Sustainability,” warns companies not to fall into the trap that blurs many companies each year when emergencies occur. These companies see disaster recovery as insurance and an additional cost that is likely to have little payback time.
This approach to disaster recovery is inadequate for today’s digital businesses. If DR tools and initiatives are seen as a cost center goal and not a business driver, an organization’s cloud services and digital transformation (DX) initiatives will be exposed to a higher failure rate, the report warns.
Other studies show that as many as half of all organizations were unable to survive the disaster. The study also found that many companies do not properly protect their data, test their disaster recovery environment, or have automated DR processes.
"After the already stressful 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, forecasters expect more hurricanes than average this season. Unfortunately, many companies may be unprepared for weather storms and may experience permanent data loss if they are not prepared from an IT perspective," said Caroline Seymour, vice president of product marketing at Zerton. To TechNewsWorld.
To avoid re-victimization, he recommends maintaining critical business, preserving valuable information, and ensuring the sustainability of information technology by maintaining a formal DR plan that can be implemented quickly.
In addition to the introduction and testing of cloud-based disaster recovery technology, IT teams need to practice their DR plans to understand what works well and where there is room for improvement, Seymour warned.
Costs of non - preparation
IT flexibility - essential for disaster recovery - is a measure of an organization’s ability to protect data during planned disruptions, respond effectively to unplanned events, and accelerate knowledge-focused business initiatives. It includes traditional disaster recovery and backup tools and the advanced analytics and security features needed for the success of any digital business in the 21st century.
An IDC study found that many organizations see new forms of disruption, such as ransomware, causing significant downtime.
Here are some key findings from the IDC Disaster Recovery Study:
More than half of the respondents are currently doing IT or digital transformation projects and see the flexibility of IT. They see IT flexibility as the foundation. But few respondents believe that IT resilience strategies are optimized.
Most of the organizations surveyed have experienced technology-related business disruptions. These situations had a significant impact on either return costs or additional staff hours, immediate loss of revenue, permanent loss of data, or damage to the company’s reputation.
Data protection (DP) and disaster recovery (DR) are key principles of digital transformation initiatives, but many organizations cannot prioritize them.
The DR strategy covers only half of all applications. This demonstrates the detachment at the business strategy level from the importance of data protection and data recovery to organizational initiatives.
A lot can go wrong
The study found that many companies struggle with the cost, complexity, and organization of their data protection and disaster recovery solutions. Nearly half of respondents (45 percent) reported challenges to restore or backup reliability.
The complexity of the backup and restore process was also a leading challenge for 43 percent of companies. These factors are highly likely to delay or disrupt IT change (DX) initiatives.
This complexity process drives about 90 percent of participating companies to continue to converge on backups and DR tools because they eliminate unnecessary tools. This shows that users are increasingly seeing backup and DR functionality, not as separate products as complementary features to a single solution.
Researchers believe the best way to recover company data is to define what IT flexibility means for their organization and develop a plan for implementation. This definition should start with the key elements of data protection, backup and disaster recovery.
It should also take into account emerging security threats and meet the requirements of all business applications. This includes on-site or public cloud-based. It should not include a one-size-fits-all IT flexibility solution.
"Since July 2020, there have been 10 weather and climate catastrophes in the United States that have lost more than $ 1 billion each time. Curry told TechNewsWorld.
Recipe for recovery
Successful disaster preparedness requires prioritization and communication. Curry outlined three ways companies can protect their data before disaster strikes:
Step one: identify the risks
For many organizations, data loss is the biggest threat. Start by figuring out where their information will be stored, if there is a copy, and if so, where the copies will be stored (on-site or in a separate location).
“Keeping all your data in one place is very risky because one natural disaster can destroy everything,” he said.
Step Two: Think about external backups
If an organization stores data separately from its primary location, that’s half the battle.
“To further protect their collateral, companies should choose a backup site that is in a different geographic area to reduce the chances of both locations falling as a result of a single disaster,” he explained.
Step Three: Consider Disaster Recovery Solutions
Many companies use cloud storage as a backup because it is easily scalable and cost effective. However, a stronger option is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).
"DRaaS is essentially plant redundancy in enterprise infrastructures. It replicates operational critical information, applications, and data to enable companies to maintain business continuity during natural disasters," Curry explained.
"IT teams are corrupted when a disaster strikes. Instead of responding to multiple requests from an organization's stakeholders, they are successful if they have a prioritized list of applications," he offered.
INAP urges customers to ensure that comprehensive business continuity is developed before a devastating event occurs. This also serves as an opportunity to identify risks and gaps that can usually be ignored.
Balancing risks
Managing data loss is a way to reduce risks and consequences. According to David Zimmerman, CEO of LC Technology International, the risk cannot and will never reach zero.
"Events such as fires, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes and other disasters can lead to business-altering data loss. Floods (especially salt water) can severely damage equipment such as servers, SD cards and laptops. As a result of seawater corrosion, data recovery can result in impossible, "he told TechNewsWorld.
However, he added that the right combination of training, enterprise protocols and cloud backups can significantly reduce data loss and make them small inconveniences instead of business-disrupting disasters.
Businesses can protect their electronics and data in the event of an emergency by including the risks of data loss in a disaster recovery plan that assesses the physical and virtual locations of their data. Then check how vulnerable both would be to losses caused by fire, floods or other events, Zimmerman suggested.
Sidestep failures
Many small businesses that don’t have IT staff are thinking of just backing up to an external hard drive or uploading storage to the cloud service. This is dangerous thinking, according to Zimmerman.
Just because your company doesn’t have all the staff with a great information management system doesn’t mean you can’t take smaller, easy steps to protect your information.
"One hard drive backup is the first step a company can take without the resources of IT staff. However, it needs to go further.
Without a formal privacy plan, all hard work and content is at risk every day because it is not copied. It is easy to act to prevent this from happening, ”he said.
Small businesses should keep track of what large companies with IT workers are doing. Implement a termination policy.
This requires backing up multiple layers, often more than you think is necessary. Create cloud-based backups connected to external hard disk storage. They should be used at the same time, not as substitutes for each other, Zimmerman recommended.
"Managing the risks of natural disasters should start with listing all the data owned by the company. Backing everything up to external hard drives - given that they are kept outside - is an important part. If a disaster strikes and all data is kept in the office, then backups are useless," he offered.
One thing that should not be forgotten
Many organizations still don’t see the importance of developing a disaster recovery plan before a disaster strikes, despite the huge risk of losing information that could affect the company’s future, Zimmerman said. The most critical point in data recovery is proactivity.
"You don't want to have to confuse creating a data recovery plan after a disaster. The plan should serve as a roadmap that includes all the sources and locations of the data and who is responsible for it," he advises.
Assessing what to do and where to go after data loss can ruin a business model, a company’s reputation, and its ability to actually do business. It can damage existing relationships with customers and partners.
"Somehow protecting forget isn't usually an issue. Which companies regret it the most, it doesn't do regular restore testing of backup data and test disaster recovery plans. If companies aren't prepared, it prolongs downtime and in some cases leads to data loss," said Shawn Lubahn, Barracuda Networks' account manager, to us.
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