Data backup and DR (disaster recovery) are critical elements of an organisation’s internal processes and key building blocks of its risk management strategy. All organisations irrespective of size, scale, or scope are subject to interruptions that impact business continuity and in a worst-case scenario can result in data loss. These could take the form of cyberattacks, severe weather, and numerous Black Swan events.
The lack of a robust and advanced backup and disaster system in place can result in critical data loss and business downtime, which can prove to be very costly. According to Uptime’s 2022 Data Center Resiliency Survey, around 60% of outages cost over $100,000. This is a massive amount of money, and this cost can be brought down by a huge margin, if there is a backup and recovery solution in place.
Organisations Shouldn’t Be Caught on the Backfoot
COVID-19 is an ongoing Black Swan event and the impact it has had on business continuity is immense and unpredictable. Overnight businesses had to shift a large percentage of their workforce to a remote work model; this meant they had to redefine their data backup and recovery strategy. IT teams that hadn’t planned for such large-scale disruptions and were dependent on legacy on-prem systems for data recovery were scrambling to find quick-fix data backup solutions that aligned with the needs of a remote workforce. For example, many employees were asked to locally back up data on removable devices until a better solution could be implemented. This is just one example of an approach that is untrustworthy and not dependable enough.
Organisations across the globe realised that their IT framework had to be strengthened with systems that were easily accessible, extremely comprehensive, scalable, and always available. In response to COVID-19, many organisations had to significantly increase their planned cloud usage across diverse processes.
The above findings illustrate how a Black Swan event can trigger changes in an organisation’s technology adoption endeavours. But a new way of working was just one of the problems faced by them. Overnight, employees found they had limited access to critical data and a lot of data was lost in the transition phase when workloads were moved to the cloud. This work model had to also not conflict with the regulatory requirements enshrined in data protection laws like GDPR, SOC II, and more.
The pandemic has also resulted in organisations trying to reduce their cost for data recovery and backup by hunting for solutions with low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), but that offer more advanced features and functional value.
Data Backup and Recovery is Crucial for Businesses
It is difficult for businesses to get their operations back on track after a disaster. Such disasters can take many shapes and forms and can range from floods to massive cyberattacks. Growth takes an enormous beating for those that survive as they try to get important systems working, taking stock of lost data and incurring a range of expenses because of the damage inflicted by the disaster. In case of weather-related disasters, this could mean an impact on physical servers and on-prem hardware that can result in a significant loss of data.
In such cases, the absence of a strong and reliable data backup and recovery solution can be telling. This can be the difference between survival and failure.
Some of the consequences of data disruption are as follows:
As can be seen, every consequence has a direct impact on business growth.
On the other hand, if an organisation has focused on developing and executing a reliable strategy for data backup and recovery, it can rebuild its processes and work its way out of the disruption quickly and effectively. There might be downtime, but it is manageable and the costs incurred will be at the lower end of the scale.
It is also important to note that data security is integral to an organisation’s growth prospects, and data backup and recovery are important components of securing data. Imagine a scenario in which a ransomware attack hits your organisation, making critical data inaccessible. But if you have data backup, your business activities remain unaffected, which means your growth remains unimpacted.
A SaaS-Based Approach to Data Backup and Recovery
Your organisation can have a comprehensive data backup and recovery plan in place, but you have a problem if this plan is underpinned by legacy on-prem hardware and software. While having a plan in place is a good idea, you must ask if it is reliable? Will it work when you need it most? According to IDC, reliability is the top challenge when it comes to data backup and recovery operations.
The solution is SaaS backup and DR.
As more and more businesses rely on complex applications that make up the backbone of their IT framework, there is a growing need for backing up huge volumes of sensitive data. This backup and disaster recovery needs to be reliable and immediately available when the need arises. SaaS backup and DR ensure you have a copy of your sensitive and important business data available at a safe and secure location. If and when a disaster strikes, the organisation isn’t worried about data disruption in any way or form.
Benefits of SaaS Data Backup and Recovery
Do you know that only 28% of organisations have full confidence in their backup system’s ability to recover data? This is a very small number, which means they are looking for a better way for data recovery. This is one of the primary benefits that a SaaS solution brings to the table.
Other benefits of SaaS data backup and recovery include:
High Uptime: SaaS backup and DR providers promise and deliver an extremely high operational performance, which includes uptime and availability. Your data is available with zero or minimal downtime.
Improved Accessibility: Considering this is a cloud-enabled solution, your data is available across distributed locations. In the event of a disruption, business continuity persists across all locations.
Better compliance: Organisations benefit from improved business continuity which is a critical element in cross-industry compliance standards that focus on data security.
Low TCO: Unlike on-prem systems wherein organisations pay a hefty one-time licensing fee, a SaaS solution is available with monthly, bi-annual, or annual subscription fees and can be scaled up and down as per need.
A SaaS-based data backup and disaster recovery strategy is also a good idea because you do not have to invest time and resources in managing or maintaining the solution. This responsibility is taken over by the service provider.
How to Choose the Right SaaS Backup and DR Services Provider?
The focus of any organisation should be on working with the right SaaS provider. This can get very difficult because of the huge number of options available on the market that typically make the same promises.
Your core focus while making the right choice should be your needs and expectations from the solution and service provider. The service provider should be able to offer a solution that meets your industry-specific privacy, compliance, and security needs. It is important to understand that compliance requirements differ across industries and geographies. E.g., if you are a company targeting EU citizens, it must comply with GDPR. The SaaS data backup and DR solutions must satisfy certain GDPR requirements.
You also need to look for a provider that delivers a service that is both reliable and offers optimal performance. The best way is to ask for documented evidence of reliability and high performance. Also important is the performance of the service provider in your industry and detailed information on how a backup and disaster recovery service performs for a specific deployment.
Lastly, you must also make sure that the service provider offers 24×7 support that can be immediately leveraged to address any challenge you might encounter.
Ether – The Right Choice for SaaS Backup and DR
Ether offers a wide range of flexible and platform-agnostic cloud services including SaaS backup and DR. We leverage the immense expertise and experience of our partners to offer SaaS backup and DR services that bring together world-class technology and usability. We only work with SaaS partners who have a history of delivering high-performance backup and data recovery services with an eye on sustainable ROI. This allows us to conform to demanding SLAs and deliver on the same. We take your data backup and recovery to the next level, irrespective of industry and business needs.
