Do our organization need disaster recovery plan? And why disaster recovery plan is so important? Often, I am being
asked, “Why my company requires DRaaS (Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service)?” too. These remind me of what my insurance agent shares with me “Whether you believe it or not, when something happens, insurance will be able to save your life”. It is same philosophy for disaster recovery, which it will help to recover your business quickly at unexpected and unplanned circumstances.
For the past year, we have heard from our friends, partners and customers that they suffer from ransomware attack. It causes loss of business revenue due to huge downtime and critical business data. Then, I have seen them spent weeks or months, just to restore back the business after the attack.
Here are the key benefits of disaster recovery planning:
- Business Continuity
When a business is affected by any form of attacks, natural disasters or simply human mistakes, it means that you have lost production which eventually lead to a major loss of business. This not only threaten day to day profit but also the employees’ productivity. Employees will feel down due to their previous hard work has gone wasted and it furthers demotivate the employees. Without a proper disaster recovery plan, it becomes impossible to resume business as usual in a short time.
- Cost-Efficiency
Most companies think disaster recovery will increase their operation cost. In fact, it is not true. A lot of companies have spent up to million dollars on IT infrastructure as they realize the importance of Information Technology (IT) in growing the business. Whenever disaster strikes, it causes millions or even billions loss of business revenue. At the same time, company reputation and branding are also impacted. Try to image this, how will you feel when your bank tells you that financial transaction is not possible for 24 hours due to attacks by ransomware? These causes inefficiency of existing investment on IT infrastructure.
- Prevention of Human Error
Malaysia is a wonderful country that is free from most major natural disasters. Thus, one can be negligent and remain in a comfort zone. The study has found out that 23% of all unplanned downtime is due to human errors. Even major hyperscale public cloud has suffered downtime due to human errors. This is because people do not work like machines. They make mistakes and mistake brings huge loss of business.
- Good Customer Service Experience
Disaster recovery plan helps business to restore as quick as possible. If your business remains shut down, offline or has a prolonged service interruption, you will be giving bad customer experience to your customer. Adversely, it gives the advantages and edge to your competitions. The faster you can get resume back your services, the happier your customers will be.
- Fast Recovery from Unexpected Facilities’ Failure
Even your comprehensive redundancy IT infrastructure will not be ready for a building’s facility failure such as power surge, broken internet fiber cable and even regular building cooling system maintenance. These are considered external factors which most people may accidentally miss out as part of disaster list. Thus, it is never too late to work on a plan for prevention.
Written by Stephen Sit (Cloud Orchestration Officer)