Commentary from Joe Noonan, Product Executive, Backup and Disaster Recovery for Unitrends and Spanning
World Backup Day is a great reminder for businesses to take a closer look at their full business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plans—which includes everything from the solutions they use to their disaster recovery run book.
The shift to remote working completely transformed the way organizations protect and store their data. Today, there is a greater focus on protecting data no matter where it lives — on-prem, on the laptops of remote employees, in clouds and in SaaS applications. Recovery time objectives (RTOs) are increasingly shrinking in today’s always-on world, with goals being set in hours—if not minutes. Cybercriminals have taken advantage of the remote and hybrid work environments to conduct increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks, and the data recovery process post-incident has become more complex due to new cyber insurance requirements. These new regulations include critical audits and tests that businesses must comply with in order to restore their data and receive a payout after an attack—which can slow down the recovery process.
With data protection becoming increasingly complex, more organizations are turning to vendors that provide Unified BCDR, which includes backup and disaster recovery, AI-based automation and ransomware safeguards as well as disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). Unified BCDR has become a necessity due to the growing amount of data organizations must protect and the increasing number of cyberattacks taking place against businesses of all sizes.
For those organizations taking a closer look at their BCDR strategies this World Backup Day, we recommend they consider the following questions:
- What data and applications are critical to ensure business productivity?
- How much downtime and data loss can be sustained?
- How will they test their solution for completeness and performance?
- What immutability safeguards are in place to eliminate ransomware risks?
- What is the process to failback to the production environment once the disaster is averted?