Data loss can have serious implications for any business. Despite this, a surprising number of businesses don’t even have a disaster recovery plan in place. There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day and a major factor contributing to the loss of this data is unplanned downtime of systems.  

With this trend, we’re seeing a growth of global disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solutions which provide companies with backup and business continuity services to insure their company of any unforeseen disasters. The DRaaS market is expected to grow to $11.71 billion at annual growth rate of 38.8% through 2022 – emphasizing its growing importance for businesses looking to outsource these activities. 

What is the status of your disaster recovery plan?

We encourage business leaders to take a proactive approach in their business continuity solutions by routinely evaluating their strategy and solutions available. To help with this evaluation, we’ve gathered 5 Key Questions to Ask.  

5 Questions to Consider When Reviewing Your Disaster Recovery Plan:

1. Do you have any unused resources or solutions?

Evaluate if any of your resources are obsolete. A great example are physical failover sites which were more common in the early days of the cloud. While they were reliable and secure for legacy applications, the cloud has made significant advances and you may not require the use of a physical site anymore. Evaluate what resources and solutions you could give up. 

 2. Has your solution been tested recently? 

Vendors all offer different testing strategies but its important to identify what testing requirements are important for your business. Testing should routinely be conducted in your DR plan to ensure that all is working as expected. Define and clearly communicate these requirements with your provider to ensure things don’t fall through the cracks. 

3. Are your RTOs and RPOs set up appropriately for each workload?

Different workloads have different recovery demands and its important to set Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) appropriately for each of your workloads. Working with a partner to help you identify the appropriate levels can be beneficial, so you don’t overestimate a workloads recovery needs.  

4. Can your solution feasibility meet your recovery objectives?

Now that you’ve set appropriate RPOs and RTOs, can your DR provider feasibly meet those needs? The key objective here – ensure that your recovery plan not only looks good on paper, it can be executed.  

5. Are you able to meet the same security and compliance requirements on both fail over and production sites?

Many companies forget about the requirements of their failover site, which is where security and compliance gaps come into play. Your failover site should meet the same security and compliance requirements as your main production site.  

Did you identify any holes in your disaster recovery plan?

If the above questions sparked some thought around how effective your current disaster recovery plan is, let’s talk about it. There are a variety of DRaaS providers that can help you manage and monitor these milestones. At MacroNet, the strength of our partner network speaks for itself, and we specialize in helping our customers find the best disaster recovery partner to prepare and execute on their business continuity plans.  

Let’s Revamp Your Disaster Recovery Strategy

1. Reach out to us, using the form below.

2. Schedule a complimentary review of your strategy.  

3. We will identify any gaps and deliver a prioritized list of recommendations for improvement.