Four reasons to keep disaster recovery in your IT security budget

Disaster recovery used to be one of the first items cut from IT budgets, citing time and expense to implement, monitor, manage and maintain something you probably wouldn’t need. But disaster recovery has come a long way, and those reasons are antiquated. However, if you’re looking at cutting IT costs, here are five reasons to keep disaster recovery off the chopping block:

1. It’s a cost-effective option: No more excuses that it’s too expensive and time consuming to have. Thanks to cloud computing, servers and operating systems have become virtualized, meaning there’s less hardware to buy and maintain. And with the cloud structured model of pay-as-you-need, you can pick and choose which applications and systems are mission-critical to recover in an emergency and save yourself the cost and trouble of backing up your entire system. Finally, cloud economics has made this technology available at scale, making disaster recovery very much in reach for most organizations.
2. You’ll need it: Seriously, you will. Cyberattacks, natural disasters and technology failures are all very real threats, and it’s naïve to think it couldn’t happen to you, too.
3. Your data is valuable: Why wouldn’t you want to keep it safe? Businesses all over the place are susceptible to disasters, including hospitals, banks and retail. Sometimes they’re even ruined. DR reduces data loss because you have a second site ready and waiting in the wings the moment something happens. With a recovery strategy such as having a warm site, you can recover your business operations faster than traditional DR.
4. It’s simple: Going along with the above, DR has drastically changed from even 10 years ago. Because of the advances in technology, it doesn’t take a herculean effort to put a basic DR strategy together anymore. With the advent of Disaster Recovery as a Service, it’s now simple and easy to have a comprehensive data recovery strategy because it is fully managed by the provider. Now, you can focus on the core projects of your business and not worry about staffing and coming up with enough resources to maintain a second site.

Cost effective disaster recovery

Disaster recovery used to be seen as too burdensome, expensive and complex to have, but the technology has changed, and so should the mindset. The risks posed by cyberattacks, natural disasters and technology failures are too great for a business to not have DR. The rise of DRaaS, cloud economics and the availability of cloud technology offer businesses a simple solution to protect what’s most valuable—their data. And when it comes to keeping that secure, nothing should stand in your way of recovering it when the worst happens.