For your business, your data means everything. Whether it’s the payment details you keep on file from your loyal customers or the specifications of an ongoing project, having access to that data is critical to your daily operations.
Now imagine what would happen if you were unable to access your data? Or if it was stolen as a result of cyberattack? From small businesses to the very highest levels of the U.S. government, such threats are ever constant, vastly pervasive and extraordinarily expensive, costing enterprises an average of $3.92 million per incident, according to estimates reported by CSO Online. In fact, the U.S. Treasury Department, as well as an agency within the Department of Commerce, were recently cyberhacked by an unnamed foreign entity, according to Reuters.
How can you protect yourself and your business? There are many strategies, but one of the most basic and effective is through disaster recovery services. Here are a few basic things to know and understand about disaster recovery.
What is disaster recovery?
Disaster recovery, as its description more or less implies, serves as a comprehensive plan that allows an individual or company to reacquire data that is lost, corrupted, damaged or stolen. While data loss these days is increasingly related to cyberattacks, it may also result from simple human error, hardware failure or some other impactful incident, like a weather-related event.
What does disaster recovery entail?
As IT Toolkit Magazine points out, disaster recovery is a very broad term and can be manifested in many forms. However, in the context of data and information technology, effective disaster recovery planning primarily rests on three pillars: prevention, anticipation and mitigation. The first pillar — prevention — involves taking steps that can limit or deter disasters from occurring. Anticipation is recognizing what those adverse events might be — as well as the potential ramifications — and mitigation is related to minimizing or mollifying the aftereffects.
How do you put a disaster recovery plan in place?
No disaster recovery plan is a one-and-done effort. In other words, it’s not something that you can simply address once and be done with it. It requires constant and ongoing effort. While one never knows when a disaster might strike, the key to prevention is taking proactive measures that can help ensure systems are fully secure. This may involve installing internet security software or backing up your data on a regular basis. It may relate to running diagnostic testing to recognize any potential vulnerabilities. It’s also important to install basic security measures that can help avoid a breach, such as using smart passwords or through multifactor authentication.
Anticipation is more about knowledge than it is about specific actions. While it’s impossible to predict the future, understanding what potential data risks or threats are out there — specifically those that relate to your industry — can give you the information you need to know what kind of issues may occur and how to neutralize those threats.
Mitigation is perhaps the most important component to disaster recovery planning. While the goal is to always prevent an incident from happening, it isn’t always possible, even when you have implemented the appropriate defenses (e.g. ongoing maintenance, data backup, disaster recovery testing, etc.). Therefore, mitigation entails minimizing the negative impact so that it’s less destructive or disruptive. Effective mitigation measures may include keeping certain hardware and software on-site that can be substituted or swapped out if it’s damaged or compromised. It may also involve where you store your data, meaning if it’s on-premises or in the private, public or hybrid cloud. The cloud not only costs less but the cloud is generally considered to be a safer venue for highly sensitive data.
Choose the right provider
This is a very basic, bare-bones description of what goes into disaster and data recovery. In short, a solid backup solution is a good place to start. From there, you can grow into a more robust DRaaS solution. This is where Lume can help. As a managed cloud services provider, Lume specializes in providing our clients with the tools and resource to help you deploy a modern disaster recovery solution. Through disaster recovery testing and orchestration, interoperability, real-time database recovery and production-like performance, Lume has the infrastructure and expertise to give you the data and disaster recovery protection you can trust when you need it the most. Please contact us today to learn more about our backup and disaster recovery solutions.
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