One of the biggest uses small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have for cloud computing is backup and disaster recovery. What used to be an alternative for physical backups is now the industry standard, as it provides top-notch protection from man-made and natural calamities.
More and more businesses are opting for this solution. According to research company Gartner, 80% of enterprises will have migrated from traditional data centers to cloud-based services by 2025 as interconnect, Internet of Things (IoT), and edge services continue to proliferate.
So why are SMBs turning to cloud-based backups and disaster recovery plans?
Enables faster disaster response
Let’s say your enterprise’s data center was damaged by a storm. Typically, if you’re using on-site servers, you might risk losing data. However, if you’re hosting backups on the cloud, your organization can respond more quickly, sometimes in a matter of minutes.
Cloud orchestration and automation tools automate the recovery process. Moreover, off-site server facilities are located in different parts of the world, making data shutdown virtually impossible. The gold standard for cloud services is 99.9% uptime, so whenever disaster strikes, your data is always accessible and recoverable.
More proactive protection against ransomware
According to the 2018 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, ransomware is the most prevalent form of malware attack. Whether you choose to pay the ransom or revert to paper-based systems, recovering from a ransomware-caused calamity is costly.
In fact, it can cause businesses to cease operations temporarily or permanently. Several incidents regarding ransomware and security breaches in Canada have been reported in 2018, showing that cybercriminals are attacking individuals and organizations alike.
Perpetrators are aware that companies keep backups in in-house servers. They quietly infiltrate these devices through backdoors and erase backups before encrypting the primary (and remaining) copy of data, rendering SMBs’ failover strategies useless.
Having backups on the cloud solves this problem. This makes your data more difficult to access by cybercriminals. Relying solely on on-site backups is like putting all your eggs in one basket, but using off-site servers makes your data practically impervious to any damage or loss.
Scalable
It’s important for businesses to continually update their disaster recovery plans (DRPs). Infrastructures, processes, and business objectives change, making DRPs outdated.
As your plan broadens in scope to cover additional critical systems and expanding data sets, the resources needed to execute it must increase as well. Reputable cloud service providers are able to scale with you so you never have to worry about disasters ever again.
Don’t let your disaster recovery plans remain outdated. Talk to our experts at Dyrand Systems to mitigate the costs of disruptions to your business .