The intensifying competition and urge for better returns on investment have made business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategies an indispensable need, virtually in all size companies. In today’s day and age, IT infrastructures are seamlessly becoming wider and intricate, more mobile, and even more virtualized – demanding a full-proofed BCDR planning in place. The bad news is, conventional recovery policies and procedures lack competency and are over-expensive. This is due to the fact that they are based on hot site and cold site configurations; backups, and redundancy that makes virtual servers to stay underutilized or sit idle and wait for a disaster to strike.

Are Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity the Interchangeable Terms?

No, both the terms are different. Let’s understand how? Typically, a disaster recovery involve tools and procedures to restore business critical components such as its data center facilities. In a DR strategy, focus is more on curtailing data loss and less on resiliency and ensuring business availability. Furthermore, it involve recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives that are usually measured in days or hours. To be honest, these conventional disaster recovery strategies are intricate and expensive to execute, which mostly remains unused. 

On the other side of equation, business continuity (BC) is more holistic. It focusses on service availability, business consistency, and efficiency across all components of the business. To be precise, business continuity planning covers all the aspects – right from the employees, IT components, databases to business productivity. The prime focus is on each business-critical component so that in case of unpredictable down times, business operations can run normally without affecting anything. However, minor disruptions can occur, but still situation remains under control.

As BC is more granular in nature, it goes beyond RPOs and RTOs, which is efficiently aligned with virtualization strategies. Furthermore, business continuity makes use of various virtualization tools to fasten the process of moving files from the affected site to the secondary sites; replicate data and virtual machines (VMs); and to ensure seamless synchronization process so that business functions can be quickly restored. However, the emphasis on business continuity does not imply that disaster recovery strategy has no significance and vice versa.

Herein, Cloud is to Rescue.  

By employing intuitive managed cloud solutions the shortcomings of both the recovery and business continuity can be curtailed. Economical and proficient in functioning, cloud architectures help in lifting the RPOs and RTOs at an unmatched pace, which is far beyond the potential of traditional recovery and continuity techniques.

Let’s understand how cloud powered BCDR and replication strategies help businesses to withstand unwarranted attacks in the most prolific manner:

Simplicity: It goes without saying that IT world is getting bigger and complex with the each passed day. Organizations are already running strategies to withstand unwanted issues caused due to any factor. One of the prime reasons why cloud-based BCDR services are gaining traction is – cloud enables businesses to predict, access, and outsource infrastructure in the most coherent manner. This, in turn, reduces risks and complexities pertaining to management and maintenance of the infrastructure. The same applies in case of business continuity and disaster recovery.

Regulatory and Compliance Needs:  Today’s competitive world reiterates that businesses having right regulatory and compliance requirements will only be successful and rest will face set-back. Day by day regulatory and compliance needs are exceeding in a smorgasbord of industries, spanning across healthcare to retail and banking sectors. Herein, cloud helps in meeting these compliance needs while opening vistas of opportunities for businesses to benefit from.

Exceeding Data Limits: Not to mention, data is growing at an exponential rate.  And, managing this data through incompetent BCDR is not feasible. Cloud being the most scalable computing solution enables organizations to quickly backup their data and access compute and storage capacity when and where required. To put it simply, with the help of cloud, businesses can scale up/down the resources to support BCDR.

Load Balancing: Another major benefit of available cloud-based BCDR services is that cloud has the potential to the capacity for built-in load balancing. This means, your BCDR will not stay idle rather it will add value proposition and return to your business.

Affordability: IT teams are under constant pressure to meet business needs in the restricted budget lines, which forces them to stick to conventional redundant strategies. Not only this curtails their growth, but also close the doors of innovation for them. Cloud-based BCDR services offer an immaculate way to manage and access resources on a pay-per-use billing model.

Smooth business functioning can be hindered by unwelcomed factors, however by availing right business continuity and disaster recovery solutions the impact can be minimized. Cloud-based BCDR moves the levers of RTOs RPOs up, provides highest level of security and scalability at competitive prices.

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Conclusion

By implementing cloud solutions for recovery, business continuity can be enhanced. It is economical and proficient in functioning the cloud architecture and helps in lifting the RPOs and RTOs at an unmatched pace. The potential is far beyond the traditional recovery methods hence it is one of the best ways to preserve the data. Effective disaster recovery ensures that your data is always safe on the server and you can restore it anytime.