In today’s rapidly evolving business climate, organizations are faced with mitigating costly, unforeseeable disasters. From malicious cyber-attacks that could cost millions to simple outages and severe natural disasters, keeping mission-critical applications available through any catastrophe is becoming increasingly difficult, as the types of instances that can cause disruption are on the rise.
As we descend into an unpredictable future, we need to take a closer look at Disaster Recovery (DR) planning to ensure that we can power-through disasters and continue day-to-day operations. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DraaS), a cloud-based solution, was just another acronym if you were to look back ten years ago. Today, it is vital to effective DR plans. As you take DR to the cloud, you can access the level of disaster recovery services you need, with the elasticity to add services as required. DRaaS is customer-focused and built to protect your data and network integrity while safeguarding cash flow and meeting industry compliance standards.
Pandemic Continuity
For Disaster Recovery plans to be effective, they should be dynamic and up to date. For example, look at COVID-19. The pandemic led to an unexpected demand on cloud-based resources, corporate networks and internet usage, as work-from-home strategies were swiftly implemented. Not to mention the rapid shift to e-commerce for many businesses. These changes required essential updates to DR and business continuity plans. Companies that had comprehensive DR strategies in place and made the necessary updates are succeeding, while others that did not are inundated and behind.
Cybercriminals
In the wake of COVID-19, we saw an unprecedented rise in cybercrime. It’s startling how cybercriminals looked at the pandemic through an opportunistic lens, zooming in on the vulnerability of remote workers, human error and overwhelmed IT technicians to stage attacks. As businesses were forced to pivot to virtual environments, increasing corporate vulnerabilities, cybercriminals committed costly crimes worldwide.
In May, the FBI and CSIA sent an alarming notification that cybercriminals were trying to interfere with the nation’s response to the pandemic. By targeting healthcare, pharmaceutical, and research sectors working on COVID-19, these cyber terrorists have basically proclaimed that disaster will not obscure their capacity to commit crimes. With that said, cybersecurity must be an essential part of your evolving DR plan to protect against threats so that businesses can continue to operate even after an attack. As cybercriminals remain on the prowl seeking to steal financial information, intellectual property, and whatever else they can crack, enterprises are losing billions each year to these crimes. We must ask what better ways can we prepare for these crisis-driven attacks in the future? What enhancements must be made to our overall DRaaS plans?
The Edge
It’s clear that the future of business has changed drastically. While IT accelerates transformation and moves closer to the edge, disaster recovery plans need to be refitted to failover for edge environments. IoT, AI and big data explosions will continue to soar, causing an increase in demand for edge computing.
At the edge, real-time insights are delivered from the IoT data collected, empowering the scale of networks and seizing next-generation connectivity solutions such as 5G. With these massive amounts of data and technologies, your DR plan needs the proper revisions to support the edge, as its adoption is only going upward.
The question isn’t whether you can prevent a disaster; it’s how quickly your business can bounce back after a disruptive event. The future is shaping up to be a dangerous place for businesses, as we do not know what new threats or attacks could be imminent. Your customers expect that you have a resilient disaster recovery plan in place, one that will protect their medical records, their financial details, and, most of all, their privacy. Your brand’s reputation can’t afford for you not to have a current plan in place. You can learn how Involta helps future-proof businesses with a solid and comprehensive Disaster Recovery plan here. You can also visit our website to learn mo
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