Prepare for Disaster Recovery to Avoid Risks and Downtime
One of the most critical aspects of a robust business continuity strategy is ensuring that you have a strong disaster recovery plan for your business-critical SAP systems. Increased risks from malware and other cyber threats make it more important than ever to put a critical eye on ensuring your end-to-end business continuity plan sufficiently mitigates these risks.
Can your business afford to have critical business systems down? According to Gartner, the average cost of downtime is $5,600 per minute – or $300,000 per hour — for most mid-sized organizations. Beyond the monetary costs, downtime can wear down your business’s productivity levels – at a time when you can least afford it.
Risks of Not Having a Disaster Recovery Plan
Not properly preparing your business for a disaster can result in great risk:
- Complete Data Loss: this can be a result of natural disasters, security breaches, or human error, all of which every company is at risk. In addition, data loss triggers many other risks if your company is unable to recover.
- Prolonged Business Disruption: downtime is money lost. Downtime is not only losing daily income, but also employee productivity
- Expensive Recovery: costs associated with data loss can become expensive very quickly –replace hardware, rekey data, downtime, and employee productivity
- Reputation Suffering: delayed disaster recovery will cause your customers to lose confidence in your business and security
Protect Your Data and Be Prepared for Disasters
The disaster recovery plan for many companies is based on using a second data center as a backup location. This solution – which is generally only an option for large enterprises – can be expensive, time consuming, and doesn’t always work. Although this solution may provide the ability to recover from an issue, it doesn’t allow your business to begin working immediately, and still results in downtime. In addition, if the second location is too close to the original data center, it could be at risk from the same event as the primary location.
For small and midsize businesses, it may make more sense to utilize an “as a service” model for disaster recovery. This type of service can be provided at an affordable cost and provide the peace of mind that IT assets are well protected.
What Does Disaster Recovery as a Service Provide?
The disaster recovery ‘as a service’ model generally includes working with a managed services partner who will help your business with set-up and testing of your disaster recovery solution to ensure it will meet your requirements for testing and failover capabilities. It will also provide a recovery site for your predefined critical workloads to a data center, DR configuration services, workload replication, client access, regularly scheduled reporting, and annual testing capabilities.
NTT DATA Business Solutions offers a DRaaS service to ensure that you’ll be equipped with the ability to automatically backup critical systems and data, quickly recover from a disaster with minimal user interaction, have flexible recovery options, and easily understand your billing structure.
To learn more about our disaster recovery options, download our solution brief.