3 Myths of Disaster Recovery
by Philip Wandrei // Director of Product Marketing for Carbonite
IT is not for the faint of heart. You face bugs, power and network failures, natural disasters, viruses, and malware. Today’s top challenge is the threat of a ransomware attack – and your organization is a prime target. Ransomware is mainly a small and medium business problem: 71.4% of companies impacted by ransomware are SMBs (11 to 1,000 employees).
The need for disaster recovery is more significant than ever.
Worse yet, most organizations are not adequately prepared to respond to a disaster or ransomware attack. Gartner found that 72% of organizations are not well positioned concerning disaster recovery capabilities.
The statistics might seem disheartening – but this isn’t the time to throw your hands up and walk away. Instead, now is the best time to roll up your sleeves and implement a disaster recovery (DR) solution. Despite what you may have experienced, SMBs have more DR options today than ever. But unfortunately, misinformation about DR persists. Let’s dispel three disaster recovery myths and learn why now is the time for DR.
1- Myth: Discover recovery is only for the enterprise.
Fact: Traditionally, DR required an offsite location with redundant hardware and software – the sort of setup that only a large enterprise could afford. But technology advancements and the availability of cost-effective public clouds allow today’s small and medium businesses to enjoy the same level of protection with Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). DRaaS eliminates the need to build and maintain a secondary DR site. And when a physical DR site is not needed, the expensive administration, upgrade requirements, and maintenance contracts are also unnecessary. Today, SMBs can utilize the cloud to implement a cost-effective DRaaS solution that meets their recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO).
2- Myth: Our backup product is enough to keep us safe.
Fact: A backup solution is a must-have these days, but it’s not a silver bullet. For certain use cases, you need disaster recovery as well. Why? Because traditional backup does not provide the rapid RPO and RTO needed for proper disaster recovery – and is not designed to handle large-scale data loss. Gartner offers a helpful distinction between backup solutions and disaster recovery:
Backup and recovery software products are designed to capture a point-in-time copy (i.e., a backup) of a workload and write the data out to a secondary storage device to recover this data in case of loss.
Disaster recovery (DR) encompasses methods and procedures for returning a data center to full operation quickly after a catastrophic interruption.
When disaster strikes, whether it’s a network or power outage, human error, sabotage, a natural disaster, or a ransomware attack, disaster recovery gives you a secondary site to run on while you restore your primary site.
3- Myth: Disaster recovery is expensive.
Fact: In the past, the fastest way to recover in a disaster was to mirror the workload on another server – often at a secondary location. But for most businesses, the redundant hardware, data center space, and additional IT resources were too costly to make this a viable option. That left many small and medium businesses unprepared for a disaster. The modern disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) approach, however, eliminates the secondary site expenses for:
Owning or leasing space
Monthly costs associated with power, cooling, and internet bandwidth
Purchase or lease servers, storage, and network equipment
Travel to and from data centers or onsite staff at the secondary data center
For SMBs today, DRaaS is usually a great fit, as it offers the benefits of a cloud-based solution:
Delivers the SLAs that your organization requires
It is cost-effective since it eliminates the expenses associated with having a secondary, physical site on standby
Provides simplicity, making it easy for your team to set up and manage the solution and restore data and business operations quickly in an emergency
Offers non-disruptive, unlimited self-service testing and reporting
Today’s choice: Disaster recovery as a service
Today, instead of living with the risk of unexpected downtime, small and medium businesses can implement DRaaS to ensure that their organization will keep running after a disaster.
Carbonite® Recover provides disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). It reduces the risk of unexpected downtime by securely replicating critical systems to the cloud, ensuring that an up-to-date copy is available for failover. Organizations can have confidence in their data protection strategy with non-disruptive, self-service tests, failover reports, and professional services support.
For organizations seeking a managed service approach, Carbonite Recover can be paired with Carbonite®'s Managed Disaster Recovery service. This white-glove service includes not only the initial setup and deployment of Carbonite Recover software but also provides ongoing management and validation that your disaster recovery solution is functioning correctly, so you can feel confident that your business can be brought online seamlessly in the event of a disaster.
Carbonite Recover provides the ability to respond on demand to all of your workload protection and recovery needs with a single, easy-to-manage platform. Best of all, Carbonite supports even the most scalable hypervisor and cloud computing technologies by enabling many-to-one protection of physical, virtual, and cloud-based server workloads.
Want to learn more about protecting your business with an effective and easy-to-implement Disaster Recovery Solution?
Whether you’re looking to protect your business or customers, connect with our technology consultants to learn more about how Carbonite can make your organization more secure. Carbonite + Webroot offers the solutions you need to establish a multi-layer approach to protect your business data against unexpected situations and digital threats.
By implementing a disaster recovery plan, your organization can mitigate risks in the ever-changing cyber threat landscape.
TeleSwitch partners with Carbonite +Webroot, offering leading security, backup, and data recovery solutions that are effective, and simple to adopt, allowing customers to implement innovative technologies that bring the flexibility and reliability that they are looking for in their security strategies.
