By Adam Scamihorn, Product Director, Cloud at InterVision
With the right tech stack and mindset, IT leaders can live in a disaster-free world.
Maybe that statement sounds dramatic or optimistic. IT departments indeed extinguish various fires daily. From increases in digital human extortion schemes like phishing to upticks in extreme weather, it probably seems like disasters — natural or otherwise — lurk around every corner. But that’s what I’m driving at: By accepting impending disaster, leaders can eliminate the fear of the unknown and embrace a more actionable disaster recovery (DR) plan.
Doing so starts by analyzing your organization’s current threat landscape, implementing proactive protections and considering scalable DR strategies like disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS).
Breaches and other downtime-causing events are inevitable
Cybersecurity risks evolve constantly. Industry experts predict the overall cybercrime market will exceed $10.5 trillion annually by 2025, up from $3 trillion in 2015.
Breaches are becoming more common — and expensive — as GenAI levels the playing field, enabling bad actors to produce phishing and ransomware schemes faster (and more effectively) than ever before. In 2023, the average data breach cost $4.45 million, a 15% increase from 2020. By 2031, experts predict that ransomware will attack a business, consumer or device every two seconds. That’s 43,200 attacks daily.
The threat landscape in 2024 may appear bleak. But leaders who acknowledge these statistics and accept the inevitability of an attack will be better positioned to weather the fallout. Furthermore, there’s utility in accepting the likelihood of a successful attack. According to Statista, nearly three-fourths of organizations have been impacted by ransomware as of 2023. Leaders who prepare for the worst now will generate massive cost savings for their organizations in the long term.
Proactivity is part of the puzzle
Disaster recovery is vital to an organization’s health. However, DR strategies shouldn’t be viewed as the enemy or the antithesis of proactive risk mitigation and cybersecurity. A robust approach to cybersecurity must seamlessly incorporate both strategies.
Proactive cybersecurity includes strong protective measures embedded in organizational software and hardware. A complete strategy includes incident response and DR plans that are tested and updated regularly. Organizations should back up and encrypt all critical infrastructure and data, preferably in a 3-2-1 schema. Backup data should also be stored in an immutable data repository that does not allow an attacker to change or delete data that has been backed up. And every recovery plan should have the option to recover in an isolated wholly separate environment that is unavailable from the source side in case of a data breach.
Additionally, IT leaders should educate employees and other stakeholders about the importance of cyber vigilance. Up to 95% of data breaches are initiated by human error, with common issues including insecure passwords and failure to identify phishing emails. Organizations should host cybersecurity training regularly to remind employees about common schemes. Proper cybersecurity hygiene should also be enforced, ideally through routine password changes and multi-factor authentication (MFA) measures.
These simple but effective cybersecurity programs protect organizations from simple data breaches. However, a comprehensive DR plan is critical to sustaining business continuity during a breach.
Disaster recovery shouldn’t be disastrous
Traditional DR solutions require significant upfront costs in hardware, software and skilled personnel. In a conventional plan, organizations create off-site storage locations backed up with all pertinent data. The complexity of this site depends on an organization’s approach to DR, with extremely cautious organizations preparing a “hot site” — AKA a recovery location capable of resuming full business operations at a moment’s notice.
Building a hot site is as ideal as it is impractical. The ability to resume business operations within moments is invaluable, especially in a digital-first world. But the steep cost of such a strategy makes it equally unworkable. Organizations that create a hot site pay for the physical infrastructure and the labor to keep it operational. DR plans require constant testing and re-testing to ensure all systems are functional in the face of disaster.
Enter DRaaS.
DRaaS is a cloud-based solution that allows organizations to back up their data and IT infrastructure in a third-party environment. These plans enable the secure replication and recovery of critical data and applications post-disaster. DRaaS guarantees data protection and a faster mean time to recovery (MTTR), minimizing downtime and its associated costs.
The benefits of DRaaS include:
- Lower costs, less complexity: Subscription-based models like DRaaS reduce upfront expenditures and operational costs, clearing the way for more immediate ROI. By eliminating the need for in-house recovery infrastructure, DRaaS also reduces labor-related overhead.
- Faster MTTR: Most businesses operate on strict recovery time objectives (RTOs). Leading DRaaS solutions help leaders meet their RTOs by restoring operations faster, often in a matter of minutes, depending on the severity of a disaster. Minimized downtime also means a better flow of communications with consumers and other stakeholders, which helps to preserve an organization’s reputation.
- Enhanced security and compliance measures: Leading DRaaS providers offer advanced security features, including double encryption, to protect data in transit and at rest. To protect from a cyber security disaster utilizing immutable data repositories and isolating DR from production is key. Furthermore, DRaaS solutions are built for compliance and regularly updated to provide an extra layer of security and assurance.
- Improved scalability: As a cloud-based solution, DRaaS is far more scalable than traditional DR plans. Pay-as-you-go models enable leaders to scale their plans up or down to accommodate fluctuating data needs.
- Automated testing and monitoring: DR plans require consistent maintenance and stress testing, especially as cyber threats evolve. IT leaders don’t have to worry about constant vigilance or maintenance with DRaaS because these solutions include automatic testing procedures.
When evaluating how DRaaS could benefit your organization, it’s essential to consider your unique risk profile. Which applications and data require protection? What RTOs is your organization beholden to? Determine an acceptable MTTR, outline KPIs and assess how DRaaS may help accomplish those goals. Remember, leading DRaaS providers can walk through this step with you to facilitate smooth, effective implementation.
Living in a disaster-free world
Preparing for the inevitability of a disaster shouldn’t jeopardize your organization’s bottom line. DRaaS presents an attractive alternative to traditionally costly DR plans by enabling superior scalability, decreasing MTTR and proactively meeting continuous compliance and maintenance needs. These plans acknowledge we live in a disastrous world — but that doesn’t mean every disaster needs to be disastrous.