Why You Need SaaS Backup and Disaster Recovery (BCDR)
Your data is the lifeblood of your organization, so you need to protect it. Computer hardware can fail or be compromised by malicious attacks, natural disasters, or human error, and when it does, you need a comprehensive: Backup and Disaster Recovery – plan, in place to secure your data and recover it quickly should the worst happen.
With vast numbers of employees working from home because of the Coronavirus pandemic, securing the remote workforce becomes even more pressing. Your fallback should disaster strike? Robust backup and disaster recovery procedures. Alarmingly, the vast majority of data breaches are not the fault of cloud providers but the result of human error. As Verizon’s Data Breach Analysis Report 2020 reveals, errors caused by sending data to the wrong recipient and misconfiguration of cloud databases or file storages are top threats. Misconfiguration errors are up by more than 20 percent since 2018. In this blog we detail:
- The Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan (BC/DR)
- Why is it essential to have a robust Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) plan?
- Why Is Backup an Essential Element of Disaster Recovery?
- Easy Data Recovery for Quick Disaster Recovery
The Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan (BC/DR): An Organization’s Safety Net
To recover from disasters such as breaches with minimal impact a robust Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan (BC/DR) plan is business-critical. CIOs, CSOs, and IT managers outline processes that help their organization prepare for and recover from disruptive events. It includes key metrics such as recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives. Understanding what these terms mean will help you make better strategic decisions around your choice of backup and disaster recovery solutions:
Business Continuity (BC)
Business continuity is the ability to maintain mission-critical services so that organizational operations can continue in the event of a disaster. Organizations need to engage in business continuity planning to return their operations to normal operations as quickly and painlessly as possible after a disaster.
Disaster Recovery (DR)
Disaster recovery is the process of restoring services after a disaster. It is often used interchangeably with business continuity. However, it is a subset of business continuity planning that deals primarily with IT assets, restoring technical operations, and minimizing downtime after a disaster occurs.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
Recovery point objective (RPO) relates to the maximum amount of data you can tolerate losing in a disaster. Another way of looking at it is the maximum time that can elapse between your last data backup and a data loss without causing serious damage to the organization. It is useful for deciding how often you need to back up your data.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
Recovery time objective (RTO) is the amount of time it takes to get back to regular operations after a data loss. Setting your RTO involves calculating how much time you are prepared to lose, and the effect that loss will have on your productivity. RTO varies enormously depending on the industry and how costly even minutes of downtime can be for certain sectors.
Why is it Essential to have a Robust Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) Plan?
According to Mercer’s recent survey on companies’ responses to the COVID-19 outbreak, a staggering 51 percent have no business continuity plans. That means that they have no plan in place to ensure their business processes can continue during an emergency. Business continuity is closely related to disaster recovery, which deals with restoring interrupted and degraded services and business processes after an emergency has occurred.
Without plans to restore business processes and recover rapidly from a disaster, the aftermath of an attack can spiral out of control. And possibly be impossible for organizations to withstand. No (BC/DR) plan leaves organizations vulnerable to the full wrath of attacks such as:
- Data breaches
- Phishing/Social Engineering attacks
- Permanent loss/corruption of data due to human error/malicious insiders
- Security lapses
- Ransomware threats
- System downtime
Read our Ebook for other Disaster Recovery best practices for Business Continuity
Why Is Backup an Essential Element of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery?
Backup blunts the effects of a disaster with the failsafe guarantee that you can quickly recover your valuable data. Thus ensuring quick disaster recovery and seamless business continuity. Organizations are increasingly migrating their workflows and data to SaaS platforms like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace (G Suite / Google Apps), Salesforce, Box, and Dropbox. A prevalent misconception is that SaaS data is immune to data loss and backup just isn’t worth the trouble or cost. However, SaaS data loss happens, frequently. Backup is essential to your business for the following reasons:
- Vital SaaS data can be lost without proper backup. Even though SaaS platforms such as Microsoft 365, Salesforce, G Suite, Box, and Dropbox are extremely secure, factors such as human error, malicious deletes, synchronization errors, malware, and outages can occur and destroy valuable data.
- A data breach is expensive and damaging to business. According to IBM’s 2019 Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average data breach costs a company an astounding $3.92 million and takes 279 days to identify and contain. That means your company may take close to a year to recover from a disaster (if it does not go out of business as a result).
- Cloud service providers advise all companies to have third-party backup in place. It takes weeks and sometimes months for SaaS platforms to restore deleted data, and restoring corrupted files completely is seldom possible.
- Good SaaS backup helps to ensure you comply with data regulations relevant to your geographical location, such as GDPR, HIPAA, and Stop Hacks and Improve Electronic Data Security Act (SHIELD) laws. These require compliant solutions for data encryption, shared responsibility, and demonstrable recovery.
- Key IT analysts, including Gartner and Forrester, strongly encourage SaaS data backup. For example, Forrester warns organizations to stop leaving themselves open to data loss and adopt protective measures for cloud data before it is too late.
- Native recovery options such as the Recycle Bin or Trash are not built for data recovery. They are designed for archival storage, so using them for restoration is a tedious process that overwrites changes. Crucially, they only store data for a couple of months at most, which is no use if a breach is detected ten months after the event.
- Reliable SaaS backup ensures business continuity. Reduce your RPO and RTO and recover data more quickly with a SaaS backup solution that delivers non-destructive point-in-time or granular restore with unlimited data retention. The addition of self-service restore reduces your recovery time even further.
Read our free ebook for compelling reasons Why SaaS Needs Backup?
Easy Data Recovery for Quick Disaster Recovery
CloudAlly delivers award-winning, secure SaaS backup solutions for Microsoft 365, G Suite, Salesforce, Box, and Dropbox. For added peace of mind, all CloudAlly solutions support multifactor authentication with backups stored on well-encrypted AWS servers. This limits your risk of incurring a data breach resulting from on-premises storage.
Take our full-featured trial, or contact us for a demo to see how CloudAlly can keep your data safe. You can also read our free ebook Why SaaS Needs Backup to find out more about the vulnerability of SaaS data and why it needs reliable backup.
