Cybersecurity, aging IT infrastructure, spikes in unwanted downtime, and other circumstances are bringing backup and disaster recovery to the forefront of many business leaders’ minds. If you’re one of them, you’re in the right place.
Our IT team has created effective, affordable BaaS and DRaaS solutions for organizations across the country, working with Veeam, VMware, Microsoft, and other best-in-class partners. In this article, we outline four steps that can enhance your existing backup or disaster recovery plan.
Step 1: Build Your Disaster Recovery Team
If your business has an in-house IT department, these individuals will be essential to your DR strategy. However, it’s a good idea to find trusted partners outside your organization as well.
Here are few reasons why you should consider partnering with other service providers:
- DRaaS experts might find weaknesses in your disaster recovery plan, which your IT generalists might not see.
- Restoring all your applications and data can be time-consuming. Having on-demand support can speed up the process and alleviate pressure.
- Having individuals in another location might be helpful if your business experiences a natural disaster and your community’s power or internet service is disrupted.
If you don’t already have service-level agreements (SLAs) in place, now is the time to build relationships with an enterprise cloud solutions and disaster recovery partner.
Step 2: Assess Your Business Continuity Needs
Many businesses assume that their backup strategies are just fine. While they might be right, without an audit of their systems, they are rolling the dice. After all, most small-to-midsized businesses cannot afford a lengthy period of downtime.
So, how do you ensure that your data and applications are protected and accessible when the unexpected (whether it’s ransomware or a hardware failure) happens? It depends.
A good first step is to assess your current disaster recovery plan and determine whether it meets your business continuity goals. To start, you must:
- Identify all the applications and services you use in your IT environment
- Set Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objective (RPOs)
Ask yourself how long you can go without access to your essential systems—and how much historical data you can afford to lose.
Then, your IT team will need to create systems that will help you meet these goals. Your plan should incorporate data protection, clear recovery processes, and robust DR testing systems.
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Step 3: Consider your Backup and VM Replication Options
When you back up data, you are copying files to the cloud or an external device. However, if your business created new data or modified existing files after your last backup, you could lose valuable information in an outage. That’s why many businesses decide to use BaaS (backup as a service) or traditional backup methods to preserve the lower-priority data and data that is relatively static in nature.
Replication, on the other hand, creates an exact copy of your business’ virtual machines in their native format. In a crisis, you can almost immediately spin up your VMs from any device and from anywhere in the world.
However, replication is more expensive than a backup, and some businesses need to maintain backups for regulatory and insurance reasons. So, it’s unlikely that you’ll decide to replicate all your virtual machines and data. (And Veeam’s modern backup solutions are increasingly blurring the line between BaaS and DraaS.)
Our team can help you determine which files make sense to back up and which ones you should replicate. We also create verified backup solutions, if regulatory compliance is a concern. And, all our disaster recovery solutions include high availability, so you won’t need a recovery plan for your recovery plan.
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Step 4: Monitor, Test, Analyze, and Adjust
Even if you want a “set it and forget it” disaster recovery solution, it’s never that simple. As your needs (and cybersecurity threats) evolve, you should regularly review your plan and adjust it accordingly.
You should also test your disaster plan, simulating an outage or malicious event, so that you can identify issues with your plan, its communication, and its implementation.
Then, based on your findings, roll out solutions that protect your data. This might include adding layers of protection to your system. For example, if you’ve historically used backups, you might decide that it’s time to replicate certain essential data. Or, if you’re already using a robust DR solution, you might realize that your Office 365 retention needs to be expanded or that you can save money by moving certain applications and information to long-term cloud storage.
Veeam Cloud Connect Delivers Peace of Mind
Veeam Cloud Connect offers comprehensive DRaaS solutions that are equally powerful and easy to use. You can affordably and efficiently protect all your applications using VM replication.
When you implement Veeam Cloud Connect, your organization will enjoy:
- Full-site failover to a remote disaster recovery site
- Full and partial failback options
- Full visibility and control from an easy-to-use console
- Best-in-class backup architecture
- End-to-end encryption
For more details about Veeam Cloud Connect, read our whitepaper, Fast, Secure Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery.
Want to Learn More About Veeam Disaster Recovery? Contact Virtual Systems
We’re passionate about backup and disaster recovery at Virtual Systems. If you have questions about DRaaS, backups, recovery planning, or testing, please reach out to us. We love digging into the technical details of these issues, and we’ll happily explain it all.
To get in touch with our team of specialists about protecting your data, please fill out our online contact form or call us at 844-2-VIRTUAL.
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