Data Foundry Blog - Disaster Recovery

If IT infrastructure was crucial for digital business initiatives before, 2020 has effectively certified that it is now at the very core of enterprise continuity and success. As the enterprise footprint evolves with ongoing remote work, cloud usage and data dependence, connectivity, and availability are serving as the backbone of operations, ensuring all disparate business elements are adequately empowered.

Many companies plan for their success, but the great one’s plan for their disasters too, that’s exactly what cost reduction disaster recovery does. This idea might seem obvious, but it often is forgotten when dealing with the everyday challenges of running an enterprise. That said, it’s imperative to think about cost reduction strategies before a crisis happens. It might be a cliché, but failing to plan is a plan to fail. When disaster strikes, every minute you delay can cost your enterprise potentially millions of dollars. Even smaller enterprises can be crippled by just one day of delay.

Regardless of business size, industry or history, the fast-paced digital world is driving an increased need for disaster recovery and business continuity, and on the whole, the enterprise is responding appropriately by incorporating more robust solutions for their IT. Organizations are looking to colocation data centers as a great way to ensure business continuity while offloading some of the burden through outsourced solutions. However, many may not realize that not every data center partner is the same, or that choosing the right data center may be the most important element in a disaster recovery strategy.

What is disaster recovery? Disaster recovery is the act of being prepared in the event of a natural disaster, a power outage, a hacking event or any number of other disruptions that can impact an organization’s operation, reputation, and bottom line.

Future proofing enterprise operations has always been critical, but the importance of having disaster recovery plans in place has never been clearer than it is in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Global challenges like the coronavirus affect all businesses, interrupting processes and service delivery and—in some unfortunate cases—compromising a business’s ability to recover.

Many companies underfund their business continuity and disaster recovery plans, not realizing several hours of downtime can cost them hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars. Every company’s DR strategy and budget should be based on their unique requirements, not a cookie-cutter plan. The best way to approach spending on disaster recovery efforts is to first understand your compliance requirements, if you have any, and then calculate your cost of downtime per hour. Once you have an idea of what that number is, you’ll have a better understanding of the ROI on different approaches to disaster recovery. In this blog post, we’ll look at average downtime risk based on availability, and we’ll take a look at how much companies typically allocate for their DR budgets.