The Importance of a Disaster Recovery Plan for Businesses

Posted by thenewsgiraffe on July 30th, 2017

Importance of a disaster recovery plan

Having a disaster recovery plan is an important aspect of an organization’s risk assessment and mitigation activities. It is essential to understand that things can go wrong. It is even more important to know what to do if and when things go wrong. Today, time is money and any downtime and disruptions in your business can cause immense loss to you. The loss may be in terms of money, trust, as well as your reputation.

While monetary loss can always be made up, it may take you enormous time to gain back the reputation that you took years to build. It is tough to get your customer to trust you again. This is the reason why it is important to have a disaster recovery plan.

The latest trend that is seen is to take the help of vendors who provide Disaster Recovery Service. Known commonly in the business community as DRaaS, this is an option that can be explored to ensure disaster recovery for your organization and ensure business continuity.

What is DRaaS?

Disaster Recovery as a Service, or DRaaS, stands for hosting and replicating physical or virtual servers by third party service providers to ensure backup and continuity in case of any disasters occurring. It goes without saying that disasters can be man-made or natural as well.

DRaaS ensures that there is a minimal delay in your systems being back up and running continuously with as little disruption in service as possible. This kind of a service is highly beneficial, especially for the small or medium sized businesses; the reason being that it may otherwise prove cumbersome and costly to set up a disaster recovery plan on their own.

How DRaaS works?

There really is no point in having a DRaaS if it doesn’t work when it is most expected to. Failure to perform can result in irreparable loss, hence most DRaaS service providers work with Service Level Agreements (SLA). The most common form of DRaaS provided by the service providers are cloud based backups.

There are also options of buying a Disaster Recovery Service outright contract or lease, or even opt for a pay as you use scenario. The well documented agreements spell out what kind of backup services are provided when. It may also list out the penalties and legal actions in case of a failure to do so. Trust plays an important role in an organization’s relationship with its DRaaS provider.

Think through and plan

The bonus for getting this right is on the businesses. It is for you to think through and come out with your disaster recovery plan as you know your business and customers well. Therefore, you need to draft the disaster recovery plan and then choose the right vendor for providing DRaaS.

It is important to discuss each and every aspect of your plan with your third party DRaaS provider and bring it into your SLA. You are the best judge to know what implications each failure or delay can cause and hence these need to be prioritized properly.