An organization’s data is recognized as the most vital asset. Companies who do not understand the importance of data backup and recovery are less likely to survive in the modern economy. According to a recent study, an hour of downtime can cost a small business around $8,000. Despite this, companies fail to invest in Disaster Recovery. Another study showed that 51% of small businesses still use local hardware-based backup solutions for their data which makes them vulnerable to data loss caused by various natural and unnatural disasters.
Below are 5 common misconceptions about Disaster Recovery:
Disaster Recovery is expensive: Business leaders often assume that having a robust disaster recovery plan will require high investment to hold copies of all servers, storage, and networks in a secondary data centre.
Cloud-based Disaster Recovery or Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) helps the organizations to move their enterprise applications to secure cloud locations where they pay only for the storage they use thereby reducing costs.
Our backup is on the on-site server: Organizations argue that their data is backed up on the on-site server and that they’re covered in case disaster strikes.
DRaaS is about minimizing the downtime after a disaster. Having a robust Disaster Recovery strategy will help the organizations to restore their operations quickly and in a highly automated fashion.
We work in a region with a pleasant weather: Organizations usually feel that because they’re working in a region with a generally good weather, they’re not susceptible to outages.
Organizations can face outages as a result of human error, malicious attacks, power outages or bad coding other than weather conditions. Thus, every company should have a robust contingency plan to be able to recover from a disaster.
There are no outages in our organization: When it comes to outages, they may temporarily go unnoticed but those small losses add up and become expensive over a period of time which can have a negative effect on the company’s revenue.
Organizations need to pay attention to outages in order to implement an effective and a reliable Disaster Recovery strategy.
A little downtime can be handled easily: Business leaders argue that because most of their systems are not customer facing, they can handle a little downtime easily. With the increasing demand for instant responses from organizations online, even a little downtime can lead to a massive impact on the customer loyalty which will further affect the revenue.
We conclude by saying that without having a proper contingency plan, companies run the risk of incurring high monetary and non-monetary losses like outages, downtime, loss of data, low employee morale, loss of reputation, and lower revenues. Thus, a robust disaster recovery strategy is important to run a successful and a secure business.