Every business that hosts data or applications in the Cloud, must ensure that these resources are protected in the event of downtime. Disaster Recovery allows organisations to maintain or quickly resume mission critical functions following an Outage. There are two key elements to business continuity and disaster recovery, the first is the recovery of mission critical applications and the other is limiting the length of downtime for your business.
Due in part to the move to the Cloud, there has been a rise in the adoption of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery solutions. Quick recovery to normal working conditions is essential. As companies become more reliant on their Cloud based systems, they are realising that they can no longer afford ant significant downtime, especially with business critical systems. The risks associated with the lack a DR plan in today’s business climate are more serious than ever before and can cripple even the most robust organisations. Organisations are realising that DR strategies are not limited to natural disasters but should include protection against malicious attack and human error. Some of the most common causes of outages now are caused by power outages and human errors as opposed to natural disasters.
The Cost of Downtime
With the pace of modern business, just a minute of downtime cripple a business. The cost per minute of downtime is estimated to run up to €6,830. While these numbers vary, the average downtime is 119 minutes, which is a long time when your EPOS, accounting or CRM is not functioning. According to IDC the direct costs of outages are between one and two billion Euros per annum. Downtime can have more than just financial implications, outages can damage your brand image and the career of the person at fault for the outage. The finance sector in the UK has been the latest victim, with the bank in question losing hundreds of clients and decimating the established trust it once enjoyed.
Trends in Disaster Recovery
In recent years, there has been a move towards greater automation, better risk assessment and mitigation and earlier detection of issues. According to research by KPMG in 2018, 60% of CTOs have implemented or expect to implement intelligent automation in 2019. If your business continuity procedures are performed manually, then you are leaving your business wide open to down time due to human error. This move towards increased robotic process automation technology reduces the need for human interaction, thereby reducing errors. It also moves away from the reliance on key staff who may not always be available. This improves both accuracy and compliance with a relatively modest financial investment, compared with other major IT deployments.
Using a service such as Microsoft Azure increases compliance due to the huge security investment and compliance requirements. Microsoft now has a network of datacentres worldwide, ensuring that there is a network of datacentres which can be used for failover and business continuity.
