Articles about Disaster Recovery

No organization has time for downtime in today’s ever-changing business environment. Disruptions including human error, cyberattacks, natural disaster and even business disruption related to the COVID-19 pandemic can wreak havoc on your business and bring it to a standstill. Having a comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) plan is critical for business resilience and the survival of your organization.  

So what is a DR plan? It can be defined as a set of processes and techniques used to help an organization recover from a disaster and continue or resume routine business operations. It is a comprehensive plan that combines the roles and functions of IT and the business immediately following a disaster. These plans allow your organization to adapt and recover from any type of disruption while also maintaining normal business operations.  

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With Gartner estimating that the average cost of network downtime is $5,600 per minute or $336,000 per hour, few would argue that regular testing of a robust disaster recovery (DR) plan is essential for organizations. Even if you omit the financial implications, the lost productivity, missed opportunities, brand damage and potential data loss and SLA pay-outs associated with system downtime should be enough to keep even the most hardened IT professional up at night.

So, why are fewer organizations than you may think doing it? In recent research we conducted, which surveyed 150 technical and business decision makers from organizations drawn from a wide cross section of UK enterprises, we found that DR testing frequency is remarkably low. In fact, 57 percent are only testing annually or at less frequent intervals. Whilst 6 percent didn’t test their DR at all. Moreover, of the organizations testing less frequently, the results of their last test led 44 percent of them to believe that their DR may be inadequate, while 22 percent encountered issues that would have led to sustained downtime.

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Even organizations with solid disaster recovery (DR) and data protection plans in place now need to re-visit their strategies due to the significant changes levied by COVID-19. However, the fact is, most companies were unprepared to begin with, and data protection and DR -- already a tricky proposition -- became even more difficult and complex during the pandemic. 

Overnight, companies of all sizes went remote. Initially, IT handed out laptops to staff as they left the building or relied on employee-owned devices. Many users connected to the corporate server via virtual private network (VPN), which were complex for IT to manage, difficult to provision, hard to scale and often providing poor performance.

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Choosing a Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) provider can be an overwhelming task, especially if your organization is using DRaaS as a first step into cloud services. There are many solutions to choose from including large providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, and also smaller or more focused providers.

The decision to work with a cloud provider for DRaaS can be clearly defined by classifying your requirements and confirming that the provider that you choose completely meets those requirements. Large cloud service providers, or "hyperscalers," may seem like the best choice for your cloud needs. However, choosing a provider based solely on the size of the organization is not always the best criteria. Hyperscalers do provide certain advantages, but keep in mind that there are also benefits to choosing smaller cloud providers that will offer individual attention and deliver more customized services. Doing your due diligence while investigating all of your options can benefit you in the following ways.

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IT professionals thinking about disaster recovery configurations for critical SQL Server deployments in Windows environments naturally think in terms of remote sites and recoverability. If the primary datacenter goes offline in a disaster, the organization needs to be able to fail over to a separate datacenter somewhere unaffected by the same disaster.

But disaster recovery and business continuity -- your ability to rapidly resume critical business functions during emergency events -- are not the same. Planning for business continuity is a much more holistic endeavor, and while disaster recovery is an important part of that plan, it is just that: part of the plan. Before you can effectively figure for disaster recovery, there needs to be agreement among your organization’s key stakeholders about which elements of your IT infrastructure are truly mission-critical. Once that’s been agreed upon -- and that’s not always an easy -- you’re in a position to implement a disaster recovery plan that will truly reflect the business continuity goals of the organization.

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We're constantly reminded of the importance of backing up data. "Do it now, or you'll regret it later", and phrases of that ilk, are frequently bandied around, but many of us are guilty of ignoring the advice and flying by the seat of our pants. Which is all well and good until something goes wrong. A hard drive fails, documents get corrupted, someone else deletes things from your computer: that's when you may -- after you've finished crying -- turn  to data recovery software.

EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard is an example of such a tool, and it's available in free and paid-for versions. Depending on how much data you have to retrieve, you may well find that the free version is all that you need, but there is a Pro version available if your requirements are greater.

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Almost one in four of UK SMEs -- around 1.4 million businesses -- don't have an IT disaster recovery plan in place. Yet, 80 percent of businesses who suffered a major incident ended up failing within within 18 months, according to the Association of British Insurers.

A survey of over 1,100 IT workers by technology services provider Probrand also finds 54 percent reveal that their disaster plan isn't regularly tested to identify and fix any potential flaws in their DR process.

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A new study from IT solutions provider US Signal reveals that 70 percent of companies have had at least one unplanned IT disruption in the last year.

These outages are caused by a variety of factors with natural disasters accounting for 53 percent, errors while implementing new technology (26 percent), ransomware (21 percent) and IT overloads (21 percent).

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We all back up our data, right? That's what everyone does! But of course, that's far from true. Most people don't get much further than thinking about putting a backup plan in place, promising themselves it's something they'll sort out one day -- and, all of a sudden, it's too late.

Deleting files by accident is easily done. If you're tinkering with partitions, it's also scarily easy to wipe out the wrong one! These are just two of the ways in which you can lose files, and if you don’t have a backup to hand, you're going to need help from a data recovery tool. Here we look at five of the best free options to help bring your files back from the dead.

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Disaster recovery has often been a choice between maintaining system availability at high cost, or choosing a cheaper solution at the expense of longer recovery times.

Now data protection and recovery specialist Arcserve is launching a new direct-to-cloud disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and backup as a service (BaaS) solution aimed at mid-sized businesses.

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The technology news has recently seen a few Disaster Recovery (DR) stories that remind us, as both consumers and professionals, of the need to be secure in the knowledge of the service that we provide to you.

The expectations for digital products have never been higher -- we all want intuitive insights and functions that are always on, matched with vast data sources, alongside high performance, across multiple devices.

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On average downtime costs an enterprise $686,000 per hour, leading to lost revenue across the economy of more than $26 billion.

Hosting and disaster recovery specialist Sungard Availability Services has put together an infographic looking at the threat of downtime and how the best companies are better placed to deal with it.

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When disaster strikes, organizations need to be able to recover IT systems as quickly as possible. Not having a disaster recovery plan in place can put the business at risk of high financial costs, reputation loss and even greater risks for its clients, customers and employees.

Despite this, each year business continuity gets cut from the budget and companies continue to fail to invest in DR. Here are five common objections that continue to dominate the disaster recovery budget discussion and why IT leaders need to refute them.

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A new survey of over 250 senior IT executives reveals that 89 percent of IT leaders are planning on implementing more cloud based disaster recovery in the next year.

The study by disaster recovery and business continuity specialist Quorum also reveals that 80 percent of IT leaders say it takes more than an hour for them to recover from a server failure, with more than 25 percent saying they need more than two hours.

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Today's businesses face a wave of challenges when it comes to protecting their data. Securing data in the cloud, a rise in ransomware attacks, and increases in unstructured data all make it hard to plan operations effectively and can lead to unscheduled downtime.

Cloud data protection company Arcserve, however, sees this as an opportunity for organizations to re-assess their ability to cope with problems. The company has released a report setting out five strategies to help organizations prepare for and respond to unplanned downtime.

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