Prioritizing business resilience and protection in 2022

Sarah Doherty, Product Marketing Manager at iland, looks ahead to 2022 and lays out the importance of a pragmatic, well-planned disaster recovery plan to ensure business resilience.

Remember 2020? How we all hope 2021 would be a better year? So much for that! As we move towards 2022, we may need more than just “hope” as a strategy. If we have learnt anything from the last two years, especially with the latest new variant Omicron causing concern, it’s that a whole new disaster recovery plan is needed; a more robust and resilient strategy, more aligned to the challenges of supporting both technologies and people in a constantly changing environment. We must be mindful that there are those who are doing their best to take advantage of the situation, using ransomware and other types of attacks to literally monetize the pandemic – and they’re getting better and better at it – the determination of cybercriminals to disrupt without conscience isn’t going away in 2022.

This means that assumptions made yesterday may no longer apply today. Organizations have pivoted from traditional issues and are now focused on working with a mobile workforce, protecting against ransomware threats, staffing for missing key employees, all while defining other priorities and goals for the New Year.

Redefining our concept of disaster

The Covid-19 pandemic completely redefined our concept of disaster. Buildings were still standing, nothing was flooded and nothing burned. Recovering from this type of pandemic disaster has completely revised how we view these types of business disruptions. Far from being back to normal, many are still recovering and finding creative new ways to keep everyone working.

Covid-19 has globally changed the dynamics of business operations. Though the Covid-19 outbreak has thrown light on weaknesses in business models across sectors, it has offered opportunities for companies to reduce IT spending by moving to subscription-based models and embracing cloud adoption. There is new focus on strategically reconsidering Capital Expenditure (CAPEX), especially as we have moved in and out of restrictions, which has caused nervousness around investment. To achieve these new strategies and avoid capital spending in these unpredictable times, organizations are moving to private and public cloud for BaaS and DRaaS.

Why BaaS and DRaaS?

Backup as a Service (BaaS) stores and secures an organization’s data files, whereas Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) stores and secures the entire server – operating system, applications and configuration – as well as data. The difference becomes apparent in the case of a total system failure.

BaaS will restore the organization’s vital data. This will allow IT teams to restart the business, but only after they have procured and configured new servers and their associated operating systems and applications. All existing user settings may also need to be recreated. In short, the business will recover but it will be hard work, with IT staff busy for weeks. General staff will operate below their usual levels of productivity until systems are back up and running as they did before the disaster event.

DRaaS, on the other hand, will restore the organization’s servers, applications, user configurations and data in hours or even minutes. Even if the physical server is destroyed, the server image can be restored to a different virtual machine (VM). The business can be up and running again so fast that very few people would realize the level of the IT failure.

How does this help businesses better protect their data?  

Local backups are usually enough to recover IT systems from server failure and other common problems. But a site-wide disaster will destroy those backups and result in major downtime and data loss for a business. DRaaS ensures complete and reliable business continuity. It is architected from the ground up to streamline data backup and recovery management, and to get critical systems back online with speed and ease.

How should BaaS and DRaaS be incorporated by the organization?

Backup is the process of copying data in cloud computing environments. It enables the retrieval of duplicate sets in case of data loss during downtime or failures, such as power outages, human errors, and natural catastrophes. Disaster recovery, on the other hand, refers to the restoration of deleted or damaged files from storage media in the event of disasters. The data recovery process refers to the state of the recovery of specific data that becomes inaccessible because of logical or physical damages to targeted storage devices. 

The need for backup is increasing among businesses due to the rising amounts of data. Backup offers various benefits to enterprises, including increased agility, data retention, lower costs, faster deployments, and improved data protection. It provides cost-effective, automated, reliable, secure, and scalable solutions. These solutions ensure business continuity in the event of disasters. Enterprises with low budgets can outsource data and applications to DRaaS vendors who provide specialized backup and restore services, and help enterprises reduce both CAPEX and OPEX.

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Looking to the future 

2022 is just around the corner, and now is the time to plan and be prepared. COVID-19 has drastically changed how organizations operate and has reinforced the need to be prepared for any type of disaster. This means ensuring a level of digital resilience and readiness to cope with any future business disruption, whatever shape that takes. While we hope that 2022 will see a return to a new-normal way of operating, we must ensure that we prepare for all and every eventuality and this means ensuring we are able to stay operational when the unexpected happens.

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