Disaster recovery on demand

Disaster recovery on demand

Companies experiences all kinds of a data disasters–from natural disasters such as fires or floods to ransomware and other cyberattacks. Malicious insiders have even been known to cause chaos as well as accidental human error. If the resulting downtime lasts too long, or business-critical data is irretrievable, there can be some devastating consequences. Company brand reputations suffer, profits shrink, and sometimes doors shut permanently. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Investing in a robust Backup and Disaster Recovery (B/DR) solution can help ensure you’re back up and running quickly and with minimal damage.

We can’t avoid disasters, but we can prepare for them. This is why it’s imperative to look beyond legacy B/DR solutions, which often offer slow recovery and rebuild times and no guarantees on the amount of data recovered, to on-demand recovery.

Your one and only goal is to minimize the impact of a catastrophe and recover from an outage quickly.

Why is on-demand recovery important for this? Let’s take three challenges that many organisations face.

Ransomware Attacks: Cleaning Up Isn’t Easy

Ransomware is a legitimate concern for businesses of all sizes. According to Hiscox, round 65,000 attempts to hack small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) occur in the UK every day. 4,500 of those are successful. That equates to around 1.6 million of the 5.7 million SMBs in the UK per year.

Cybersecurity incidents cost the average small business £25,700 last year in direct costs (e.g. ransoms paid, and hardware replaced) but this is just the beginning. Indirect cost such as damage to reputation, the impact of losing customers and difficulty attracting future customers, remains unmeasured but is expected to significantly exceed this.

Recovery, and the rate at which you return to normal operations after a disaster event like ransomware is an important issue. But terms like recovery point objectives (RPOs), failover, failback, and all the other traditional DR concepts can be overwhelming and seem overly complex. But it shouldn’t be. Data recovery should be easy – at least from your perspective.

The Difficulties of NAS Recovery

Typically, when you need to protect or back up NAS data, it’s a three-phase process:

• Scan for the changes to the data to know exactly when you need to back up compared to the previous backup.
• Fetch any new data.
• Write the new data to the backup storage.

The first step can be time consuming because data protection solutions or backup software need to scan through all files, and folders to identify changes since the previous backup. This can significantly impact the RPO because backup window, i.e. the total time it takes to do the actual backup, is longer.n

Access to Data for Rapid Restores

In the event of an unplanned outage, security threat, or attack, ensuring that your organisation remains operational is crucial. Most DR strategies put too much emphasis on recovering mission-critical and revenue-impacting data and systems but don’t take the time to test the work environment.

Regardless of the reason–DR or routine testing–the ability to provision and restore is often required, and that means time, hardware, and human resourcing.

On-Demand Recovery

Ekco’s disaster recovery solution is designed with your recovery expectations in mind and can be configured for based on your backup, retention and disaster recovery requirements. Your data is backed up at any level from a single file, message or data object to a complete physical or virtual machine, even to dissimilar hardware.

Organisations want access to their data, but in reality, this has not always been easy. Often businesses are reduced to managing an extensive, complex and convoluted portfolio. At Ekco, we understand your desire for an all-in-one, consolidated backup and recovery solution.

Thanks to Ekco’s 24/7 managed service, you can enjoy the most proactive management of your IT systems on the market, confident that any irregularities are noticed and acted upon straight away.

With automated DR testing available, businesses can enjoy more than just system and data replication to a secondary location. We prepare your standby systems for use every day and test them in our cloud so we can sure you get instant access to your standby systems, should you need them.

Finally, growing amounts of data coupled with stringent compliance regulations mean longer term retention is becoming increasingly important. Ekco only uses local datacentres, ensuring you remain compliant and can quickly access and retrieve your data.

Data recovery doesn’t have to be complex, time-consuming, and expensive. With Ekco, no matter where your data and applications live, whether on-premises, or in the cloud, they can be protected with the same policy-based approach and easy-to-use experience.

For a live demo or to get more information, contact our sales team on sales@ek.co.