In the United States, commercial businesses spend approximately $375 billion on insurance. Those same businesses spend approximately $10 billion on backup and recovery or disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). Certainly, the physical assets of a company are critical and need to be replaced if destroyed, but the virtual assets of a firm are just as critical – frequently more critical – than the bricks and mortar, and are irreplaceable. Yet, businesses spend 3,700% more protecting their physical assets than their virtual assets. This sounds like a conversation that needs to be had with the CFO.
ARG can help you prepare for that conversation. You see, with thousands of clients around the Washington, DC metro area, ARG has experienced it all. One of our clients had both a fire and a flood in their data center in the same year. Another client had Cryptolocker on their network. Still another simply overwrote key data by accident. We have not yet heard of a disgruntled employee taking revenge on their employer yet, but we suspect we have clients who have encountered that as well.
Backup and recovery used to be about just taking a copy of your data off site in case the building burned down. 20 years ago, that was the best we could do because that was all that was available. 20 years ago, a tape backup in someone’s car or with a storage facility was best practice. Today, if a disaster strikes, senior leadership will be asking why you did not have a better plan. Four days to rebuild and restore critical information and systems is not a disaster recovery strategy – it is a disaster in itself.
However, protecting against a disaster is really a secondary reason for a strong backup and recovery service. Honestly, the chances of a fire, flood (usually the result of a plumbing issue above your data center, rather than a weather event), earthquake or other form of natural disaster are so remote, that it may be hard to argue for more than a low-cost tape backup system. Today, modern backup and recovery systems protect you from “minor disasters” as well. These events tend to be seen as inconveniences to most, but to senior management, they are still major disruptions to the operation of the business.
“System back-up and recovery are the only certain solution to ransomware”
Minor disasters might be severe weather keeping your employees at home, a power outage in the middle of the summer, an innocent mouse click that downloads a virus which holds your data for ransom, or even accidentally saving over a document that then needs to be recovered. These are individually inconvenient – well, your data being held for ransom is more than an inconvenience – but in the aggregate, they probably represent a significant impact upon the productivity of the business and the IT organization.
ARG objectively represents the backup and recovery of several providers. Key elements of a modern system are:
- Real-time updating of changes only to your data to minimize bandwidth consumption and data loss.
- Multiple recovery points to prevent the recovery data from being overwritten by corrupted data.
- Low-cost testing options to allow frequent quality assurance and recovery time drills.
- Maintain a low profile. Your IT efforts stay focused on production, with the business continuity platform operating transparently in the background.
- Cost effective. ARG has helped numerous clients afford a modern backup and recovery implementation by finding IT cost savings in other services.
Many clients tell us that they have upgraded their backup and recovery platforms with their IT vendors. While the IT vendor solution probably offers several advantages over the previous system, the approach has one fatal flaw: it couples the production environment with the business continuity environment. Industry best practices require both a physical and a logical separation for the recovery platform. Having a single vendor manage both violates the logical separation tenant and exposes you to considerable systemic risk of the IT vendor.
ARG is uniquely positioned in the cloud space to provide alternatives and discuss the expected experience. We are completely provider neutral and have an extensive portfolio of options. Coupled with some of the best cloud expertise in the Washington DC area, ARG can assist in moving you to an environment that meets your needs.
Contact ARG to discuss your cloud needs. To get started email us below or call 866-521-5121
