Once you are faced with the reality that your business operations have been compromised - time is of the essence. Having a thorough Disaster Recovery Plan will save you substantial amounts of time, money, and resources. A Disaster Recovery Plan (or runbook) is a working, living document that is unique to every organization - the business' specific blueprint on how to recover quickly and efficiently from a DR event. However, a lot of DR plans are not thorough enough to serve as any help during an actual disaster event.

A few weeks ago, a customer went through a data loss event. When we hopped on a call to discuss the issue, they said “I guess now is a great time for us to see if our DR plan really works.” Though we can happily say they recovered their data easily, during an event is not the time to “see if it really works.”

It’s not whether if you “should” move to the cloud or “when” you move to the cloud, but WHY. A vast majority of enterprises are already moving to the cloud, but for smaller enterprise environments, or the SMB, the question of “why” is still being asked. Here is a great 90 second video from the experts at Zerto that discusses the 3 main advantages as to WHY business should take advantage of the cloud:

All organizations are at risk of facing disaster, whether its ransomware, human error, natural disaster, etc. The need for a thorough Disaster Recovery Plan has never been more vital. Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives are the foundation of every disaster recovery plan to minimize essential data loss, maximize productivity, and to ensure uptime. Do you know exactly how much an outage could cost your business? This blog explores the difference and importance of investing in low RTO’s and RPO’s.

There are many factors to consider when it comes to how fast your systems recover from a backup. Are you recovering from incremental, differential, or full backups? Backup schemas such as these can affect your recovery times. Then there is recovery from on prem or the cloud, the size of your databases, hard drives, files, etc. and bandwidth. The 3-2-1 rule is the gold standard for backups but at the end of the day, it’s bandwidth and network capacity that have a big impact on your recovery times. During a DR event when data must be recovered, bandwidth and network capacity need to be your friend, and many times, they can slow you down.