When you see big brands such as Marriott, Target, and Sony in the news announcing they have fallen victim to cyberattacks or ransomware, it can be easy to think that it could never happen to your organization. Sadly, it is not until an unexpected natural disaster, cyberattack, or even human error occurs and severs access to critical corporate data that a company ends up realizing the full extent of the fallout—to their bottom line and their brand.
The numbers paint a very grim picture. According to a Ponemon Institute study, 61 percent of small businesses experienced a cyberattack in the last 12 months, and 54 percent fell victim to a data breach. Making matters worse, 23 percent of organizations have never tested their disaster recovery strategy—and, worst of all, 40 percent of small businesses close their doors following a natural disaster.
However, with options such as Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), unexpected disruptions and costly downtimes can be quickly mitigated. With cloud-based resources and total system backups secured in alternate locations, DRaaS provides companies with peace of mind that mission critical applications can run in good times and bad.
So just how can DRaaS help your company prepare for the worst?
In a survey of over 550 cybersecurity professionals, 50 percent believed their organization was not prepared to repel a ransomware attack. These attacks caused businesses more than $75 billion in losses in 2016. By taking your data hostage, attackers believe they have the leverage they need to extract thousands of dollars from you in order to get it back. And, without a backup plan, many businesses fall victim.
But DRaaS can help minimize more than just the negative effects of ransomware. Hardware attacks, stolen equipment, and corrupted data can all cause organizations to grind to a halt. In each of these cases, DRaaS provides organizations with the ability to restore operations within hours, offering fully functional copies of software and data for failover. Not even traditional back-ups can match these metrics.
Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, wildfires—when Mother Nature strikes, the impacts can be massive. DRaaS offers organizations a plan B to restore operations when the smoke clears or enable services to resume in an alternate location, helping to limit the impact to your employees and your customers.
By providing access to key backups, applications, and resources in geographically disparate data centers, DRaaS offers rapid and reliable recovery solutions without the administrative and hardware overhead that other on-site, in-house backup options require.
Not all attacks are malicious in intent, but the effects can still be devastating. Whether by ignorance, negligence, or clumsiness, insiders can pose a high security risk to an organization, whether they know it or not. Given the access that end users have to critical financial, human resources, customer, and even proprietary corporate data, the adage that you are only as strong as your weakest link rings ever more true.
A DRaaS can be a key part of your defense against accidental deletions, ambitious migrations from test to production, and unsuspecting clicks in phishing emails. Given the flexibility of DRaaS offerings, data recovery from these “mini disasters” can be pinpointed to specific applications, databases, or even time periods so work can continue like it never even happened.
Many organizations do not have a disaster recovery solution in place because of a concern about price, time, or changes to their operations. Unfortunately, a true event can end up being far more disruptive. In fact, according to Gartner, the average cost of downtime caused by an IT failure is $5,600 per minute or $300,000 per hour on average. This doesn’t even account for lost customers, delayed deliveries, or damage to your brand.
Regardless of the size of your organization, your industry, or your balance sheet, unforeseen events are going to occur—manmade or not. Fortunately, the stress, complexity, and costliness of a traditional disaster recovery plan is made simpler and more cost-effective with a DRaaS service.
Reach out to the experienced team at FNTS to learn more about how your organization can be ready when disaster strikes.