It isn’t until disaster strikes that organizations often learn how vulnerable they are.

A large US-based financial institution was planning a new marketing campaign. Independent research showed that customers perceived them as behind-the-times and lacking in innovation and they were working with an outside agency to update their image from old fashioned to hip. It turns out that the customers were on to something: even a million dollar plus ad campaign could not disguise the fact that their systems and business processes were sadly out of date.

While the CIO was on his way to make a major presentation to the Board of Directors, his laptop suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure. None of the data on the laptop was backed up. This incident exposed a large vulnerability when it was discovered that hundreds of senior level management and financial advisors were working on outdated mobile technology that had no data protection or back-up procedures, placing the enterprise at serious financial and regulatory risk.

“We could invest in a corporate business continuity solution or invest in an ad campaign telling people how modern we were. Unfortunately we chose the ad campaign and almost paid a big price. Luckily we only lost one laptop before our vulnerability issues were exposed. The ad campaign was placed on hold while we began work on a cloud-based Disaster recovery strategy.”  Director, US financial services firm.

Disaster Recovery – What’s the Barrier?

It isn’t until disaster strikes that organizations often learn how vulnerable they are. Recent research from Aberdeen Group suggests that the biggest single barrier to an enterprise having a viable disaster recovery (DR) or business continuity (BC) plan is budget; but as with the story about the financial services giant with no back-up plan for desktops or devices, ROI for an effective D/R plan is usually realized by the ability to avoid a single disruptive event.

Research shows that certain types of catastrophic events are rising. Natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and other weather-related phenomena are increasing while hardware failures or cyber attacks represent other threats to business stability. With events widely scattered around the globe, there are no geographic safeguards.

Disaster Recovery in the Cloud

Historically, implementing a DR strategy demanded a significant capital outlay. Servers, software, tape and disk storage units, space, power, cooling, etc. combined to make a large expense item that did not always fit in the IT budget; however, as manual processes and paper have been replaced by automation and digital systems and we have increased our reliance on technology to run all aspects of our business, DR is no longer a luxury: it is an essential element of responsible IT governance.

With the advent of cloud-based service providers, organizations of all sizes have access to affordable, secure and compliant data center solutions for DR/BC services.

The same Aberdeen study found that cloud backup technology is gaining in popularity with 30% of the survey respondents’ already using cloud backup while 25% plan to implement a plan in the next 12 months. This means greater than 50% utilization across all sectors and sizes of companies with growth predicted to continue.

Are You Ready for a Cloud-Check?

A cloud-based Disaster Recovery plan provides a scalable, flexible, secure and affordable solution that can meet the needs of any size of organization. Navantis has been offering Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity solutions to Canadian organizations for over ten years. We recently opened a state-of-the-art Data Center facility that takes advantage of the latest technologies, automation, self-service and application management best practice.

Contact us for a free assessment and follow-up report today and learn how affordable a cloud-based Disaster Recovery solution tailored to your needs can be.

This post was written by Adis Tucakovic
Adis Tucakovic is the VP, Managed Services. Adis is a strong business and technical leader with 12 years of progressive experience in IT Consulting, Sales and Management roles with hands-on technical and program management experience. Adis is an accredited Microsoft Certified Master in Exchange Server, Microsoft IT Professional and Technology Specialist in SharePoint and Lync Server.