Ensure Business Resilience with Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery and Continuity Planning Solutions

Disasters can happen at any time, anywhere and without any potential warnings. Either artificial disasters or natural calamities, they are capable of destroying cloud server databases and all the important information that is sensitive to any organization. To avoid all the losses, any organization must ensure business resilience with cloud-based disaster recovery and continuity planning solutions. But what are these solutions, and who provides them? Let us have a look at how these services work.

Importance of Disaster Recovery Planning

Suppose anyone is working in a service-based organization that provides cloud services to people, and suddenly they are not able to login into the system somehow. All the servers are showing busy because of a denial of service attack, and the cloud services stop working, impacting all the clients and customers, overall affecting the organization’s image in the market.

For any organization, it is essential to have a resilient business structure, especially in today’s high-competition market. Sometimes these disasters are intentional, i.e. created by cyber terrorists like SQL injection. That leads to the loss of confidential information, including admin login IDs and passwords and the marketing strategy of the company. Or else natural calamities like a sudden change in weather, damaging power lines, power outage, solar flares, communication break due to bad weather, cloud disconnectivity, etc., can cause issues. Hence, many big IT techs provide disaster recovery plans like VMware and Microsoft Azure.

Key Components of a Disaster Recovery Plan

DR (Disaster Recovery) and CP (Continuity Planning) are the two most important factors for the organization to provide backup whenever needed. Following are the key aspects of a basic disaster recovery plan to avoid any data loss.

• Business impact prediction

• Business impact analysis

• Risk assessment

• Securing all resources

• Recovery objectives

• Disaster forecasting

• Backup and recovery procedures and protocols

• Testing and maintenance

• Disaster drills and planning strategy

• Communication plan

• Generating reports for future planning

Which Sectors Provide Disaster Planning Solutions?

Disaster recovery planning solutions are provided by many service providers in the market and also by many vendors in the business sector. These sectors can be generalized as

Cloud Service Providers

Many cloud service providers have the service of disaster recovery protocols that can help any organization whenever needed. They provide site protection and site recovery options to deal with security failures and precautions against upcoming disasters. They mainly focus on the protection of cloud server databases because they are the most vulnerable to disasters on the open internet.

IT Consulting Firms

These firms help to set up proper DR and CP solutions and backup to deal with any of the issues. They generate a report to show how many resources are vulnerable to disasters, regular software updates, risk factors and workflow conservation in the organization. These are significant factors for both growing enterprises in the market and avoid any vulnerability.

Disaster Recovery Service Providers

Some companies have expertise in disaster recovery services because of their experience in the market and the different types of disasters they deal with. Those strategies will help any growing organization to survive in the market.

Software Vendors

To manage the DR and CP solutions, some private vendors provide excellent services to manage business and plan for disaster recovery. These vendors work on a small scale, but some having good experience would help the startup grow.

Business Consulting Firms

Business consulting firms are the most common examples of disaster recovery planning providers, which mainly focus on market events, stock prediction, the organization’s business at the national level or international level, the company’s value in the market and how to boost its products or services securely.

Which are the Different Disaster Recovery Solutions Available?

As discussed above, there are many small-scale and large-scale solutions available in today’s time that provide very good disaster recovery solutions. Based on the organization seeking the solutions, these different parties and vendors provide different strategies and solutions. For a well-furbished organization, some of the good options for disaster recovery planning solutions are mentioned below −

• Microsoft Azure Site Recovery − Azure Site Recovery is a well-known cloud-based disaster recovery solution that provides security by creating a backup of critical applications and databases at another secure location. The price here is based upon the number of virtual machines protected at that instance. Price starts at 25$ per month per instance and goes up to 45$ per month per instance for replication.

• IBM Resiliency Orchestration − Any organization can buy server protection from this organization at 35$ per month per server to make them more secure by providing site protection and strategic guidelines.

• VMware Site Manager Recovery Manager − This is also a popular disaster recovery planning and solution provider, especially testing for VMware-based environments and also provides automated orchestration, starting at $545 per virtual machine per year.

• Zerto − Zetro is another disaster recovery planning solution and strategy-making platform that provides different reports and services to avoid cloud-based disasters starting at 795$ per year.

• Acronis Disaster Recovery − This is a generalized disaster recovery solution provider. The price is based on the contract with a customized profile.

These are a few examples of solution providers, and many different options are available in the market as per the need.

Steps to Implement your Disaster Recovery and Continuity Planning

This is a general guide that shows how to start disaster recovery planning from the beginning to implement it in your organization. The steps include −

• Find your business recovery needs and business continuity

• Choose a cloud provider solution

• Setup secure remote cloud environment

• Configure the plans accordingly

• Test your recovery plan

• Monitor and maintain the solution

• Maintain logbook and future plannings

Conclusion

For any growing organization, it is necessary to have DR and CP solutions readily available to them. If the data is lost without the backup, it is forever gone. Choosing a good recovery plan leads to security and compliance, increasing latency and bandwidth, scalability, cost optimization and expert support of the services. That is how anyone can ensure business resilience with cloud-based disaster recovery and continuity planning solutions.