A well-tested backup and disaster recovery (BDR) plan can be the difference between recovery and catastrophe, especially in the event of natural disasters, cyber-attacks, human errors, or hardware and software failure. With most businesses relying on digital services to generate revenue and deliver services, it is critical to have a BDR plan in place to mitigate your risks while ensuring compliance.

However, if you had your BDR set up a decade ago using old methods, you might have an inadequate DR strategy that doesn’t prepare your business for evolving threats like ransomware. It could also unknowingly be taking a good chunk of your IT budget.

BDR technologies, especially cloud-based like Microsoft Azure, have moved forward in recent years, providing businesses with simple, scalable, and more secure BDR options. Azure allows the flexibility to consolidate your resources into a single platform that makes it easy for you to back up your systems at lower costs.

Is it time to rethink your backup and disaster recovery strategy? Here are a few signs you should.

1. You consider your backup, the same as your DR strategy.
   
   Backup and Disaster Recovery are often used interchangeably. Sadly, some organisations consider their backup as their disaster recovery strategy too. There are main distinctions of these two. Backup is your process for replicating files to a specific location while Disaster Recovery is your method of retrieving your data after a natural disaster, cyber-attack, or power outage.
   
   Even with your data stored on traditional tape backups, without a DR solution in place, recovering your data could take days to complete. This impacts your business’ ability to bounce back quickly and efficiently. But you can simplify the process by consolidating these solutions using Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery.
   
   Available separately, these BDR solutions combine convenience for both cloud and on-premises requirements. Azure Backup provides backup and recovery functionality built into the Azure platform that covers VMs, files and folders, Exchange, SharePoint, SQL, and more, both in Azure and on-premises. Azure Site Recovery, on the other hand, is a DRaaS solution that can natively protect your on-premises workloads and Azure-to-Azure cloud recovery.
   
   
2. You are still paying a fortune for your DR.
   

   Your on-premises servers used for backup are costly to maintain and refresh every few years, and using data centres as an offsite DR locks you in for lengthy and expensive contracts. Fortunately, there are now more affordable alternatives so you can use that extra budget for more strategic IT initiatives.

   
   Microsoft Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery helps to improve and optimise your operational costs by allowing you to pay only for the services and storage space you use monthly, resulting in significant cost savings. You can start having a reliable and secure BDR solution in Azure for as low as AUD 30/month – no matter what type of data, virtual machine, or application you want to backup.
   
   
3. You are unable to meet your business’ RTO and RPO demands.
   
   Today’s businesses are “always-on”, hence many organisations are in constant pressure to meet specific SLAs around recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). RTOs are becoming increasingly challenging to achieve, with goals set in hours if not minutes. If you are challenged with meeting your organisation’s RTO and RPO requirements, you should explore Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery.
   
   In a 2022 IDC study on the business value of Azure Site Recovery and Azure Backup, it indicated 93% reduction in unplanned downtime thereby reducing the number of data losses occurring annually. The same degree of improvement was experienced with respect to recovery time needed to restore lost or corrupted data. The combined improvements of these two resulted in 97% staff productivity boost.
   
   
4. The location of your DR is not as compliant as you need.
   
   If you have old-school DR where your data is going off to a third-party data centre, how do you know for sure that it is compliant to your industry’s standards?
   
   With Microsoft Azure, regardless of whether your organisation is large or small, you get the same security, privacy, and compliance protection that Fortune 5000 companies use. It is the most robust cloud platform in the world, conforming with the most rigid compliance standards like GDPR, ISO:27001, PCI DSS, and more. Review Azure compliance here to learn more.

Time to review your Backup and Disaster Recovery strategy

Hybrid working, new and evolving threats, and huge amounts of data are just some of the things that make the IT world very different today than it was a decade ago; all of which warrant a review of your current BDR strategy. You need a solution that simplifies your IT operations, lowers your total cost of ownership, and can protect your diverse set of workloads whilst giving you the flexibility to restore your apps and data to any point in time and location. Make sure you have a robust backup and disaster recovery plan as part of your business strategy.

But where could you begin?

Start with setting aside some time today to review your BDR plan. To ensure you invest in the right solution, you can seek professional assistance from our consultants to review and assess your BDR strategy. Please fill out this 1-minute survey to help us understand your current situation or contact us at 1800 126 499.