When an incident occurs, your team immediately shifts into overdrive. However, are you confident that each action they are taking contributes to getting your operations back online as swiftly as possible? It’s all too easy to get caught up in panic mode, thinking about all of the systems that need to be restored or quickly shifted with revised processes. Having a robust cloud solution might guarantee that your data storage is safe, but that doesn’t bring your operations back online in the event of a major cybersecurity incident or another type of disaster. When you bring together a robust backup disaster recovery process with your cloud solutions, you are ensuring that your business operations can be efficiently restored when you need them. This takes your resilience a step beyond data recovery and ensures that your digital assets have greater availability over time.
Enhanced Security Standards for Cloud Solutions
It’s not unusual to have questions around cloud security, particularly as you’re considering shifting operations from on-premise to the cloud. While the fundamental infrastructure of most cloud solutions are secure, there are often required steps that must be taken by customers or IT service providers to ensure the long-term security of the applications and data structures that are stored within the cloud. Gartner recently estimated that up to 99% of cloud-based security breaches will be caused by such vague issues as “misconfigured databases” or other preventable security failures. When you combine advanced backup disaster recovery (BDR) with cloud-based solutions, you’re defining a more active strategy that will help protect your organization in the future.
Creating IT Resilience in a Cloud-Based World
Simply shifting your strategies to cloud-based storage and business applications is not enough to ensure business continuity. Instead, your internal team and external IT partners will need to form a cohesive and comprehensive strategy that pulls together operations throughout your organization for BDR. Data recovery is often considered a “first step” in disaster and recovery scenarios, but this will never be enough to reboot your operations after a cyberattack or other disaster incident. Leading BDR and cloud vendors recommend a three-tiered approach that includes:
- Maximize cross-infrastructure tools for resilience. With many companies shifting some or all of their operations to the cloud, there are still significant amounts of information and processing accomplished on-premise. Knitting together these two storage and application strategies is a vital component of IT resilience.
- Prioritize testing and compliance. Having the right standards in place “in theory” will not help your organization be successful during and after an expanded incident. Your team needs to be well-versed on the specific processes to launch — and when they should be launched — as well as ensuring that team members are clear on communication standards and practices.
- Invest in staff training. Few activities are performed in a void, which is why staff training and testing are of the utmost importance. Staff members that are clear and confident in their roles are much more likely to be successful and help reduce the amount of downtime experienced by your organization.
Putting strategies and processes in place for BDR can help reduce the amount of IT downtime your company experiences. With per-minute costs for IT downtime soaring up above $5,600 for a small business, reducing downtime is a crucial aspect of your IT planning strategies.
Creating a secure, reliable, and compliant infrastructure for your business requires concerted and ongoing effort on the part of your internal IT team and your external technology partners. The professionals at Coretelligent are well-versed in the complexities facing life sciences, financial services and other companies with rigorous standards for their technology infrastructure. Each of our IT, project management, and support experts are dedicated to ensuring your business success by creating robust security strategies using industry-leading solutions. Contact our team at 855-841-5888 or via email to info@coretelligent.com to learn more about how our backup, disaster and recovery solutions support a more secure infrastructure in the cloud.