Backup and disaster recovery solutions have always been critical components for any business. The past two years have, however, raised the stakes. The pandemic has highlighted the scale of the data threats facing every business today. Cybercrime is rampant, with ransomware, account takeover attacks, and phishing schemes all proliferating.

Moreover, while hardware failures do not make the news, they are a frequent occurrence that can cause significant data loss across an organisation along with deletions through user error or malicious intent.

The shift to remote working over the past two years has also raised levels of business vulnerability. Work from home (WFH) and hybrid arrangements have created more challenges for IT professionals, especially with the rise in shadow IT, which is the use of software and devices without the explicit approval of the IT department. More employees working remotely means more opportunities for cybercriminals to breach weaker defences across a distributed network of personal devices, corporate laptops, unsecured Wi-Fi networks, and exponentially more remote connections to their servers and applications.

CYBER-CRIME WAVE
Cybercriminals have taken advantage of the remote and hybrid work world to conduct increasingly sophisticated attacks, making it even more critical for businesses to assess their business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plans frequently. In fact, the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) recently announced that it recorded a 2,650% surge in phishing and a 423% increase in malware incidents in 2021. Employees working from home are often an especially vulnerable target.

As the cybercrime landscape evolves, organisations must shift to a "not if, but when" mindset when assessing their security needs, which includes their BCDR strategy.

THE ROLE OF DATA BACKUP
Today, with growing cyber-threats along with data living in more places than ever before, we are increasingly seeing the importance of having stringent data backup technologies and processes.

It is especially key when you consider there is often zero tolerance for downtime in an always-on world. Businesses are - often unrealistically - expected to be back up and running as normal immediately after a system failure.

A robust backup approach is crucial if organisations want to avoid losing critical data. Many businesses find that difficult. Backup is often manual and unreliable, with administrators often wasting many hours every week babysitting the process and considerable time fixing errors.

Additionally, tests to ensure that disaster recovery, or even just local recoveries, will work well have become more important as the amount of data continues to grow. But since these tests are often time-consuming, they typically are not completed as frequently as they need to be, are completed in inadequate ways, or sometimes not at all.

PLANNING FOR RECOVERY
Organisations that prioritise unified BCDR solutions will be best positioned to stop data loss incidents, whether through malicious cyberattacks, natural disasters, outages, power or hardware failures or accidental data deletion. BCDR represents a set of approaches or processes that help an organisation recover from a disaster and resume its routine business operations.

Disaster recovery is a key element of an organisation's recovery strategy and involves getting IT systems up and running quickly following a disaster. Businesses need to determine acceptable downtime for critical systems and implement backup and disaster recovery solutions for them, as well as SaaS application data.

Planning for disaster recovery involves first defining parameters for the company such as recovery time objective (RTO) - the maximum time systems can be down without causing significant damage to the business, and recovery point objective (RPO) - the amount of data that can be lost without affecting the business.

Critically too, it also includes implementing backup and disaster recovery BCDR solutions and creating processes for restoring applications and data on all systems.

TEST AND AUTOMATE
To simplify the disaster recovery process, unified BCDR solutions use automated disaster recovery testing to ensure backups are ready when disaster strikes.

Indeed, this kind of testing is a vital part of a backup and recovery plan. Without proper testing, organisations will never know if their backup can be recovered. According to the 2019 State of IT Operations Survey Report, only 31 percent of the respondents test their disaster recovery plan regularly, which shows that businesses usually underestimate the importance of testing. Automation also plays a key role in day-to-day backup operations with unified BCDR solutions, with features that proactively fix common problems in the backup environment.

Technicians can spend up to 33% of their day monitoring, managing, and troubleshooting backups. Organisations should therefore look for solutions that provide a unified view from a single dashboard to help save time and reduce human error. To achieve this, the best BCDR solutions integrate seamlessly with existing IT solutions.

Every second counts in mitigating cyber-attacks, so organisations should look for unified BCDR technologies that use AI and machine learning to identify suspicious activity and alert administrators.

Getting the BCDR strategy right is critically important to the ongoing viability of any business. When implemented properly, it will ensure that organisations are able to operate as normally possible after an unexpected interruption, with minimal loss of data.

Ultimately it will allow IT decision-makers to stop losing sleep over missed backups and failed recoveries and move positively ahead with a unified BCDR solution that offers the peace of mind they need.

More info: www.unitrends.com