Disaster recovery: One size doesn’t fit all
By Carrie Reber
When it comes to disaster recovery, there are important decisions to be made so you can be prepared for whatever comes your way. These decisions fall into three major categories:
- What kind of disaster are you dealing with?
- What are your end customers’ expectations or requirements?
- What cost of service delivery makes sense for you?
What kind of disaster is it?
In the past, physical and natural disasters were the most commonly discussed recovery use cases. Whether the cause was a failed hard drive, fire, flood, or hurricane, the priority was simply getting the production environment back up and running as soon as possible, with minimum data loss. While these things certainly do still happen, and fast recovery with minimal data loss is still the goal, today’s IT professionals are increasingly faced with cyber-attacks, such as ransomware.
In this scenario, a more nuanced approach is needed. When cyber criminals attack, your network essentially becomes a crime scene, and a too-hasty recovery back to the original production environment risks re-infection with malware, while also making forensic analysis of the attack more difficult. In these cases, by recovering to a secondary, alternate location is a best practice. This allows businesses to continue as usual without these risks.
| Learn more about the Special Considerations of Ransomware Recovery in this on-demand webinar with our friends at Arcas Risk Management. |
What are your end users’ recovery requirements?
Not all businesses, or all applications within a business, have the same tolerance for downtime. Some end users can handle hours of downtime while an on-demand recovery takes place and aren’t willing to pay for better SLAs. For these situations, you simply need assurance that backups are happening as scheduled, without errors, and scheduled recovery testing can provide another layer of assurance for when it’s time to initiate a recovery that things go as planned.
But others have stricter requirements with little tolerance for downtime and are willing to make the financial investment to ensure the fastest possible recovery. For these businesses, you’ll want to plan in advance, creating a bootable standby image after each backup. This way, recovery will be faster, as the first steps in the process will be already done.
If you’ve planned ahead, and are well equipped for either option, you’ll reduce your stress levels during an already stressful time.
What is it going to cost to deliver as promised?
The good news is that an expensive BDR appliance isn’t the only way to get the job done. Historically, IT service providers believed they needed traditional image backup or expensive appliances to provide the full range of disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) options. The costs and inefficiencies of traditional products were accepted as the price of robust disaster recovery. However, this has changed with the introduction of Cove’s Standby Image feature.
Cove’s appliance-free, direct-to-cloud architecture equips you to deliver the same business outcome at a lower cost of service delivery. You choose the recovery location that works for your customer and avoid the heavy upfront investment and ongoing maintenance costs of a proprietary backup appliance. Only Cove combines cloud-first SaaS architecture with business-class disaster recovery options.
Chad Grahek, president of Grahek Technology and an early adopter of Standby Image, says it best: “Cove Data Protection’s Standby Image feature is the most flexible solution we have used. Since Cove is cloud first, the recovery appliance does not have to be on the same network, we can use a hardware configuration that works for each customer, and it’s easy to manage. Compared to other solutions that store backups onsite first—this is less complex, works faster, and we can be sure that the backup is always in sync from one dashboard.”
Learn more about Cove Data Protection here.
For more blogs on Backup and Disaster Recovery, click here
Carrie Reber is senior product marketing manager for N‑able.
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