Top 5 Benefits of Disaster Recovery (DR) Adoption

The role of technology in business and concurrently the ways to protect data and applications is critical in organizations because downtime always leads to negative impact. The role of IT systems and services for business continuity is highly essential to ensure trust and reputation with customers and partners. Cloud based disaster recovery (DR) solutions offer data protection to yield higher ROI compared to in-house DR solutions that require high hardware cost and resources.

IT downtime can be classified as man-made or natural or hardware failure. Whatever the type of disaster, organizations cannot afford downtime of their IT systems for prolonged periods of time.In reality, almost 75% of disasters are a result of human errors. Downtime due to disasters result in damaging the organization’s reputation andimportantly man-made errors areunrelated to natural disasters (earthquake, floods, fire, etc.). The impact of downtime further leads to loss of data and application services and the extent of damage varywith the type of business. According to IDC, failures in IT have an impact of over $10,000 each hour in the case of SMBs. Data loss due to human error or hardware failure can also lead to irrevocable doom for business organizations.

Many organizations implementing DR solutions still rely on tape backup and restore methods, but they have their own set of drawbacks. Tape backups do not includedata from branch officesandis highly time consuming.Organizations having branch offices had suffered down time of over 48 hours in some instances. Backup and restore operations can be handled easily when data and applications are centralized by availing cloud based DR solutions. For enterprise organizations, cloud based DR services offer affordable and simple protection of applications and data from disasters and ensures business continuity by restoring data and applications within minutes through cloud disaster recovery as a service. In a recent survey (Jan 2015) by 451 Research, it is found that over 60% companies are encouraged by cloud DR solutions for its simplicity, affordability and ease of deployment and are considering immediate adoption to augment their existing site-to-site disaster recovery solution.

Organizations adopting cloud based DR solutions can reap certain key benefits as discussed below:

1.   Business Continuity (BC): In today’s competitive markets business continuity is highly critical to maintain employee productivity and generate revenue. Businesses when faced with downtime due to unforeseen reasons or hardware failure experience severe negative impact for the organization. The impact due to downtime can at times become overwhelming irrespective of the nature of business or industry. Downtime often results in organization’s inability to respond to emails, attend customer queries, access important data for decisions and so on. A cloud DR solution ensures business continuity by restoring quickly all data and applications and the business is back online in few minutes after a disaster and avoids losing money due to extended downtime.

2.   Maintains reputation for the organization: DR solutions help a company to maintain reputation with customers and partners. Losing customers and partners because of downtime can be disastrous for businesses, in addition to financial loss. Customers and partners can lose trust in a firm easily if it is unable to meet basic obligations because of downtime. For example, when an accounting audit firm is unable to render services as promised, like filing tax returns can end up in a lawsuit from angry customers. Therefore, the reputational loss of downtime can vary between organizations, but the bottom-line is that loss is always highly negative. Cloud DR solutions available with data centers is developed to restore data in minutes thus ensuring the organization maintains its reputation and trust with clients.

3.   Ease of use and affordable: Traditional DR requires complex equipment, dedicated budgets and above all knowledgeable staff for restoring data correctly during disaster. Cloud DR solution offers a simple and automated centralized process by replicating data in high capacity storage disks where applications and data is restored within minutes after a disaster or disruptions. Further, centralization supports branch offices in different locations to secure their data against loss. In addition to its ease of use, adopting DR solution works out to be affordable than purchasing hardware and investing in resources. The advantages of DR in support of BC over time yields higher ROI according to the 451 Research report.

4.   Management consistency and self-service protection: Maintaining and monitoring DR in-house require new training and skills for IT staff. Sometimes the cost can be high and also time-consuming for some organizations. With cloud DR, IT staff can easily manage the DR environment because of its easy to use UI and pay-as-you-go model with data availability ensuring access to DR all the time. Further, the user organization has complete control over their data and applications on when and what to protect.

5.   Ensures compliance and industry regulations:  Downtimes, whether short or long is always harmful. Moreover clients are more aware of important industry regulations and legal requirements such as SOX, HIPAA, etc. All these regulations require business organizations to closely safeguard and protect digital information for immediate access at all times. Cloud DR protects organizations from compliance violations and legal issues related to downtime or data loss.

The availability of affordable cloud DRaaS from data centers ensure organizations to recover quickly from small or big failures and easily secure their applications and data. Cloud based DR solutions help enterprises to recover their data within minutes to minimize downtime and to ensure business continuity.