Amongst the various operational, technical, and organizational challenges emerged by the global COVID-19 pandemic, challenges in managing business resiliency have bubbled to the surface followed by an increase in remote work culture. The new normal of remote workforce has created challenges for almost every small and medium-sized organization as they have not been adequately equipped with a solid business continuity plan for remote work.
Only with a little warning this entire shift to remote work was executed in a very urgent and unplanned manner. Many organizations had to come up with an exigency remote work plan. Therefore, a robust business continuity plan for remote workforce is the need of the hour to ensure strategic business objectives continues to be met so the organization can stay afloat.
Migration to Cloud
The flexibility, scalability and reliability of the cloud are hogging the limelight as organizations strive to keep businesses operating as normal during the COVID-19 pandemic. For many organizations, cloud technology and its ability to enable continuous working across time zones and regions become a business continuity lifeline during this global pandemic. Despite the complexities and spiraling cost involved in moving workload to the cloud, most of the organizations had already embraced cloud-based backup and disaster recovery solutions. On the other hand, organizations that still using on-prem for their backup and disaster are also considering to moving towards cloud-based backup and disaster recovery strategy.
Advantages of a Unified Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery Strategy
The primary goal of having a cloud-based backup and disaster recovery is to minimize downtime and secure business-critical sensitive data. Combining both these initiatives into a unified strategy helps enterprises achieve this goal by providing numerous advantages over supporting each individually.
1. Reduced Complexity
Implementing a separate strategy for business continuity planning creates a complex environment that is challenging to manage and secure. The more the number of additional vendor/tool/applications, increases your enterprises’ attack surface by presenting new vulnerabilities while decreasing visibility.
2. Efficiency and Reliability
Cloud based backup and disaster recovery solutions gain advantage from advanced technology and data centers that are geo-dispersed to ensure high level of redundancy and availability. A well implemented cloud-based backup and disaster recovery strategy offer automatic failover and push-button failback for maximum uptime.
3. Improved RTOs and RPOs
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) are the key considerations to monitor when it comes to data protection and disaster recovery. The uninterrupted business continuity you get with a unified cloud-based backup and disaster recovery strategy helps you to hit your RTO and RPO goals
4. Increased security
Security is the top priority for cloud services providers, as they cannot afford to lose customer trust. Cloud-based backup and disaster recovery solutions are shielded by top-of-the-line security technology at every layer—from the environment and physical perimeter to the data and infrastructure layers.
5. Easy Scalability
Combining cloud backup and disaster recovery ensures that you always have enough resources available. As per your enterprises’ needs change based on the covid pandemic demands (in terms of remote workforce/business functioning model) it is easy to scale up or down to meet demand.
6. Faster Recovery
Cloud-based backup and disaster recovery strategy can be accessed from anywhere, which substantially shortens recovery time. Be it a pandemic, natural, or political disaster, the recovery team will be able to install the backup files and initiate the disaster response immediately.
7. Lower Costs
Cloud backup and disaster recovery lowers costs associated with disk or tape storage space as well as hardware and software maintenance. A unified cloud strategy frees up IT team to work on business-growth related plans.
Remote Management
Another important aspect to consider while implementing a business continuity plan during this covid situation/dispersed workforce is the ability of the IT admins to do everything remotely. They should be able to monitor, maintain, test, and recover every backup remotely. With a cloud-based backup and disaster recovery strategy, enterprises can do all of this from a single web-based interface. This means that no matter where your workforce or their devices are located, your enterprise can meet recovery objectives with pre-defined policies, all with a few clicks.
Automation of Backup and Disaster Recovery
The best way for more efficient business continuity planning during this pandemic is by automating the backup and disaster recovery process and this helps to eliminate the need for too much human involvement in the process. Some of the benefits of automating backup and disaster recovery includes:
- Handles the complex process of backup dynamically and quickly with predefined rules
- Ensures protection from the potential disaster of disk loss or human error
- Relieves IT staffs from hours of tedious, manual tasks associated with backups
- Keeps files and data between business-critical applications in-sync and backed up for disaster recovery purposes
Are you looking for an end-to-end backup & disaster recovery solution to protect your business-critical systems, applications, and data while ensuring business continuity and seamless disaster recovery? Talk to our experts today!
Learn more about our backup & disaster recovery solution or email us at sales@sbainfo.in.
