Disaster Recovery (DR), is often an understated aspect for a business. The cost for an unrecoverable outage may well be your entire business. Planning, implementation, and testing of a traditional disaster recovery solution is a complex and expensive process, though cheaper than the cost of doing nothing. Fortunately, with cloud enhancements and Microsoft Azure there are more cost-effective options that are worth considering.
If I told you that in 2020 more than 50% of companies, have either no no disaster recovery plan or had an insufficient one would you believe me? A disaster can occur at any time, and have multiple sources; hardware failure, cyber-attacks (ransomware), human error, natural disasters, and employee malfeasance just to name a few. The statistics are not on your side: an estimated 25 percent of businesses do not reopen following a major disaster.
Moreover, DR solutions are often not adequately tested or sometimes not tested at all. Documentation of DR solutions may be lacking and tend to fall out of date as systems and personnel change. If you can’t enact the DR plan, then effectively you don’t have a DR plan. Revisiting your plan at least yearly is important. The viability of any DR solution requires that any changes be well documented and updated as required.
The cost of not having a DR plan is an evolving concept. Traditionally the major costs have been primarily lost revenue during downtime, lawsuits, decreased customer trust, and industry sanctions and censorship. More recently government regulations have entered into the mix for some industries and can include massive fines, and potential incarceration. In more modern systems that might take advantage of historical data for data science and machine learning to support AI ventures could end up with invalidated results.
If you don’t already have a strong DR process or are retooling an existing DR process consider instead Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). An example of DRaaS is Azure Site Recovery. Azure Site Recovery simplifies both implementation and testing failover scenarios, all without having to purchase additional hardware, and less need to staff up IT to support an organization failover location. Interestingly, many of the costs involved with azure site recovery are not charged until the computing power is needed to support a failover mode.
In today’s fast paced world customers expect a high degree of up time without excuses. The barrier to entry from moving from a traditional DR to DRaaS solutions lowers the barrier to entry while offering some best in class solutions for disaster recovery. An Azure DRaaS solution will still take effort and some investment, but the overall costs, maintenance and speed of implementation are significantly reduced.