cloud disaster recovery

4 Reasons Why Disaster Recovery Plan Should Be a Priority

Bobby Varghese

Quick question? – How long can your business survive without any critical data, applications and operations?

Anything more than 48 hours could indicate that you do not need a viable disaster recovery plan. Let’s face it, at some point your data will be at risk. It could be a machine error, a human error, a virus or even a natural disaster like an earthquake. Turning your back on proper precautions could mean losing it all.

Think of your disaster recovery plan as an insurance policy for your data and business if something out of your control happens.

 

Disasier recovery plan

This is why we’ve compiled our top 4 reasons why your backup and disaster recovery plan should be a priority.

Machines & Hardware Fail

While we have reached a stage in technology where Intelligent bots are shaking up lawyer’s jobs, it’s still not perfect and is bound to have issues here and there. Identifying and eliminating the single point of failure in your IT infrastructure could be an expensive affair, although it is really the only way to ensure that a hardware failure will not interrupt your service or cause data loss. The best option is to backup your data regularly, ideally with a leading and highly secure managed hosting provider.  This will help to eliminate any interruptions in case of IT infrastructure failures.

 

Humans Make Mistakes

This is the most seen mistake, and the hardest to prevent and correct, regularly backed up data lets you restore it to an error-free state. As much as we wish we were, people are not perfect and can easily overlook an important step in a process and accidentally delete data or enter the wrong data. Making sure you have efficient processes in place and good quality assurance programs are your best bet, but having an online backup solution can be as equally important.

 

Nature is Unpredictable

We have all read and seen what can happen when the wrath of mother nature hits, which can be unpredictable at times. Businesses that don’t have a backup and disaster recovery plan in place can find it almost impossible to resume operations after a major disaster hits. In fact, an estimated 80% of all companies that experience a business interruption of greater than five days, without recovery plans, go out of business.

 

Customers Want Access 24/7/365

Times have changed, now customer holds the key to a business, an average customer expects the information they want to access to be available at his will. This means if your organization is facing infrastructure issues and cannot pull out the data in a timely fashion, these anxious customers could jump ship to a competitor.

 

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.

Check out our packaged disaster recovery solution just for you

Contact Sysfore’s Cloud Disaster Recovery & Backup experts for your no obligation / no cost in-depth analysis to see just how simple and cost-effective it is to implement a robust cloud Backup / Disaster Recovery plan for your Enterprise. Write to us at info@sysfore.com or call us on +91-80-4110-5555 to know more.

Disaster Recovery is Broken… Don’t blame Your IT! Switch to Zerto DR

Shantha Kumari

We hear a lot about the ease of cloud, the flexibility of cloud – the ability to cut down on your costs and consume only what is required. The correct term would be “cloud bursting”. If this were that simple, then every business would be queuing up for this opportunity. They would not have to spend time, resource and money on significant and complex cloud migration projects.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity for a New World

Disaster recovery is more than just a strategy in your business continuity plans. It is a crucial part that will get your business back online in the event of any natural or manmade disaster. What most organizations don’t realize though is that the right disaster recovery solution will also deliver IT resiliency.

Zerto is more than just replication and DR. Zerto provides enterprise-class disaster recovery and business continuity software specifically for virtualized data centers and cloud environments. It is offers enterprise workload mobility, from a product that works exclusively in the virtual layer. That means they can move applications and data, in a consistent state, in a few clicks, with just a minute or so of disruption and also between different hypervisors and clouds.  

Zerto DR Equipped for any IT World

Sysfore and Zerto – a Viable Partnership

Cloud DR is the basis for deciding when, where and how to move your business to cloud. With Zerto, effective DR is possible within the private cloud, to the public cloud and in the public cloud.

Zerto partners with Sysfore, the leading Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) to offer a cloud based business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) service, enabling businesses of all sizes to protect production applications both to the cloud and in the cloud. Having extensive Cloud DR expertise, Sysfore offers Zerto Cloud DR Ecosystem and services powered by Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR) 4.0 — a platform for secure, non-intrusive, cloud-based BC DR for private, hybrid and public clouds.

Get in touch with our DR experts and we’ll give a free assessment on implementing Zerto’s DR solution for your business.

Disaster Recovery Solution from Zerto

Zerto’s hypervisor-based replication technology is the first disaster recovery system that lets Cloud Service Providers offer cost-effective, automated, enterprise-class DR as a Service. With Zerto, cloud providers can deliver a solution that is:

  • Multi-site — the ability to replicate between more than one site, enabling you to support many customers.
  • Multi-tenant — full integration with multiple platforms like VMware, Hyper-V, AWS and Cloud, which enables centralized and simplified management of all virtual data centers as well as effectively leverage resources within the cloud to realize economies of scale.
  • Array agnostic — replicates any customer environment to your cloud regardless of their storage vendor or architecture
  • Deployed quickly and remotely — installs remotely in hours without requiring any changes to the customer environment
  • Tested and validated anytime — recovers customer applications in your cloud with one click of a button
  • Granular — allows customers to pick specific applications to protect, regardless of their physical server or storage location
  • Comprehensive — provides robust replication and offsite backup in one simple product
  • Consistent and reliable — provides scalable, block-level replication with RPO of seconds and RTO of mere  minutes

Implement Zerto’s Disaster Recovery solutions in your business, to avoid costly outages. Installation of the Zerto Virtual Replication software can be completed in under an hour, even for complex applications. By replicating at the hypervisor level, Zerto simplifies replication and recovery into a three-click process.

Contact Sysfore’s Cloud Disaster Recovery experts thorough info@sysfore.com or call us at +91-80-4110-5555 to know more.

Cloud Backup or Cloud Disaster Recovery – What’s the difference?

Shantha Kumari

Cloud Data Backup is not Cloud Disaster Recovery. One particular misunderstanding among the customers is about cloud backup, storage and disaster recovery. Its mainly due to the misrepresentation by the cloud vendors, and lack of background information on their part.

Many organizations are considering cloud backup because it eliminates tape-based backup technology, automates backups, removes the human capital component and other services like off-site tape storage fees.

Get your facts clear about Cloud Backup, Cloud Storage and Disaster Recovery with a free consultation with Sysfore cloud experts.

Before discussing about the difference, here is the definition of Cloud Storage, Cloud Backup, and Disaster Recovery.

The Cloud Defined

In the beginning stages of disaster recovery planning, decision makers are often mistaken about what constitutes a disaster recovery plan. Many times they are misled by the idea that data backup is sufficient precaution in the event of a disaster.

While having a backup strategy is important, it is not the same as a disaster recovery strategy; rather, the beginning stages of establishing a proper DR plan. A backup is a copy of your data; a disaster recovery plan is insurance that guarantees its recovery.

However, there is a misconception that cloud backups can improve an organization’s recovery time simply because it is a disk-based backup. In reality, it may take you longer than tape to restore.

There are three easy questions to ask to determine if a cloud backup service can work as part of your disaster recovery strategy:

  • Can you get your data from where it is in the cloud to where it needs to be for restoration and recovery and still meet your recovery time objective (RTO) requirements?
  • Can you perform your disaster recovery using additional cloud services from the same provider thus the data is where it needs to be for restoration and recovery of your critical systems in the cloud?
  • Can you regularly test either of these two scenarios (or both) as a part of your contract before locking in a long-term contract with the cloud backup provider you are considering.

So, what makes backups and disaster recovery different?

  1. Data retention requirements

Backups are typically performed on a daily basis to ensure necessary data retention at a single location, for the single purpose of copying data.

Disaster recovery requires the determination of the RTO (recovery time objective) in order to designate the maximum amount of time the business can be without IT systems post-disaster. Traditionally, the ability to meet a given RTO requires at least one duplicate of the IT infrastructure in a secondary location to allow for replication between the production and DR site.

  1. Recovery ability

Disaster recovery is the process of failing over your primary environment to an alternate environment that is capable of sustaining your business continuity.

Backups are useful for immediate access in the event of the need to restore a document. It does not facilitate the failover of your total environment should your infrastructure become compromised. They also do not include the physical resources required to bring them online.

  1. Additional resource needs

A backup is simply a copy of data intended to be restored to the original source.

DR requires a separate production environment where the data can live. All aspects of the current environment should be considered, including physical resources, software, connectivity and security.

  1. Planning process

Planning a backup routine is relatively simple, since typically the only goals are to meet the RPO (recovery point objective) and data retention requirements.

A complete disaster recovery strategy requires additional planning, including determining which systems are considered mission critical, creating a recovery order and communication process, and most importantly, a way to perform a valid test.

The overall benefits and importance of a DR plan are to mitigate risk and downtime, maintain compliance and avoid outages. Backups serve a simpler purpose. Make sure you know which solution makes sense for your business needs.

Sysfore can clear your misconceptions about Cloud Data Backup and Cloud Disaster Recovery. Get in touch through info@sysfore.com or call us at +91-80-4110-5555.