When you work from home, have you thought about what happens when your IT infrastructure goes down? Did you back up your data and have a disaster recovery plan? 

In 2016, Ponemon Institute reported that the average downtime cost businesses from $5,600 per minute to $9,000 per minute. But most businesses are going to have a lot more downtime than a couple of minutes. The ITIC 2019 report shows that out of 1000 businesses surveyed worldwide, 86% of businesses say that the cost for one hour of downtime is $300,000 or higher. This doesn’t even cover the litigation cost and penalties. Throughout the past five years, hourly downtime costs continue to rise for all organizations regardless of industry and size.

How to avoid downtime?

As businesses transform toward digitization and cloud computing, every company will experience downtime either from their IT infrastructure or third parties’ IT infrastructure. 

Since there is no way to avoid downtime, many companies use disaster recovery to mitigate downtime impact. However, there are many disaster recovery options such as traditional backup, online backup, traditional disaster recovery software, disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). 

In this article, I will introduce you to each of these options and why you should choose one over the other.

Why do you need backup software?

In 2020, 90% of companies had a backup of their data to prevent data loss. What is backup? A backup is an exact copy or copies of multiple versions of a system and data in another location. 

Data protection and legal requirements are the primary reason why companies back up their data. 

While some organizations (banks, insurance, healthcare, etc.) are required to store sensitive data on premises, most midsize to large organizations today store their backup image (a compressed file that contains the backup content) in the public cloud. The reason is that cloud backup vendors offer inexpensive, long-term storage solutions to store a large amount of data. If a company wants to store all their data by themselves, then they would have to invest in private cloud infrastructures, which are costly and still subject to failure. 

Conversely, cloud providers keep the backup content in different data centers, so if one data center goes down, other data centers can still provide access to the data. Similar logic also applies to SaaS data. SaaS companies do not back up their customer data for a long period since that is expensive, so companies should perform SaaS data backup on the cloud as well. Therefore, it is very important to consider cloud backup solutions for most businesses. 

What backup software is not for?

Backup software is great for data protection and legal requirements, but they are not ideal for business continuity. This is because all the data generated after the most recent backup will be lost after a data loss disaster. This means most businesses will lose their transaction data for that period, which could lead to customer dissatisfaction and lawsuits. 

Another reason is that rebooting a system from a backup takes a long time. First, users have to download the image file and uncompress it. Then they need to mount the file on the hardware and wait for installation. This could take at least 30 minutes to a couple of hours. 

Why does it take so long? Most backup storage hard drives are tape storage. Companies buy tape to store long-term data because they are very cost-effective to store large amounts of rarely used data. The downside is that tape storage is slow to access compared to disk storage. So if you are trying to download the data from tape, it would take a long time. Since many companies keep their backup disk away from their primary data center, there will be added travel time to retrieve it. Hence, companies should not consider backup software for business continuity.

Why do you need disaster recovery software?

Disaster recovery (DR) software is designed to ensure that your business will operate as usual in case there is a system failure in your infrastructure. DR solutions replicate systems and data continuously (range from minutes to seconds) in a second private cloud or data center. DR software service level agreement (SLA) is usually measured by recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). 

Since DR software constantly synchronizes with the source, the user can trigger a failover and continue IT operations in minutes, making it an ideal business continuity solution. Common DR SLA standard ensures that the last copy of the replicated data is fairly up to date since replication periods are measured by minutes or even seconds. But DR isn’t cheap; traditional DR setup would require businesses to purchase DR software and rent or buy servers in another location for DR backup storage. This is a significant capital expenditure (CAPEX), if the users do want to pay for CAPEX, then they can look into disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS).

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS): the future of disaster recovery

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) allows companies to execute traditional DR replication on a vendor cloud data center. Companies don’t have to pay for a secondary location, upfront hardware, or maintenance costs. The vendors provide ready to use platforms that automate workload replication and failover. The recovery speeds between DR and DRaaS are similar—minutes down to seconds. 

The pros of DRaaS are that users only pay for storage in replication or storage mode, and once a failover triggers, users will only pay for CPU and memory resources. This saves companies from paying unused CPU and memory resources. DRaaS is also easy to manage since everything is prebuilt. The con of DRaaS is that they are less flexible since everything is prebuilt. However, as the DRaaS industry matures, more features and capabilities will be available to surpass traditional DR solutions.

Conversely, DRaaS tends to be much easier to use but less flexible. DRaaS providers base their entire business on helping their subscribers avoid an outage in times of disaster. As such, these providers will have generally gone to great lengths to create reliable platforms that can be counted on to keep critical workloads running.

The ideal setup: disaster recovery + backup software

DR and backup software cannot replace each other. DR software is the short-term solution for immediate reaction to IT system failure. Backup software is the long-term solution that allows users to store multiple versions of a system (in case one version is corrupt). Although buying both solutions can be expensive, companies need to realistically calculate how much they would lose if they lost control of their IT infrastructure. Not only does it cost money, but the additional cost can come from such as customer dissatisfaction, potential lawsuits, and internal cyber threats from rogue employees. 

I recommend companies do these calculations with their IT team, finance teams, and corporate lawyers to come up with a budget. The ultimate question should be “How much are you willing to pay for the potential loss in monetary value?” and go from there.