Can Your Data Recover from Disaster?

Man has always battled nature for survival, and now so does our technology. Natural and manufactured disasters can cause downtime, data loss, and stop data entry in its tracks. To combat these losses, disaster recovery has become an integral part of an organization’s data security plan.

Disaster recovery isn’t just about protecting your network from natural disasters. Ultimately, it is about ensuring that whatever damage occurs to your IT infrastructure, your business won’t take too much of a beating. The objective of disaster recovery is simple: stay afloat in the midst of a crisis or, at a minimum, speed up recovery after a crisis occurs. To accomplish this, it is important to understand the threats your network faces, and how to mitigate them.

Not only is your network under the constant threat of the natural disasters that are relevant to your geographical location, but many cyber attacks can impact your network as well. Server security is always important, as a compromise from a malicious attack like ransomware can ruin the productivity of day-to-day business. Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report found ransomware in 48% of the breaches it analyzed. During these attacks, cloud backups or images become invaluable. With a safe backup, your organization can get back to work as soon as servers return to a secured state. CISA advises keeping encrypted backups offline and testing them regularly, because attackers often try to delete or encrypt the backups they can reach.

Another cyber attack to be aware of is a Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS attack. A DDoS attack is when your server is actively targeted with the intent of making your website or services inaccessible. In order to mitigate the damage of these attacks, it is best to use a service that can proactively monitor all traffic to the server and drop any that are indicative of a DDoS. This service, however, does not help with a self-inflicted DDoS, which is when your server experiences more legitimate traffic at times than it can possibly handle.

Finally, server outages can happen without warning. These outages can occur from a simple application failure, hardware problems, or even natural disasters. Since they are difficult to prepare for and often occur unexpectedly, this is where disaster recovery focuses on the recovery and another reason why server backups are of the utmost importance.

To understand the economic incentives of disaster recovery solutions, there are two measurements you should know: Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective. Recovery Point Objective, or RPO, is the last point in time that your systems can be recovered to. RPO is dictated by the replication technology used. These technologies include backups, storage replication, and continuous data replication. Recovery Time Objective, or RTO, is how quickly applications are recovered and operations are resumed. RTO is influenced by the level of manual versus automated recovery processes your organization is using.

The loss of data and the downtime that follows can be costly. If your business doesn’t have a disaster recovery solution, consider investing in one. At CHR, our Managed Services team is well versed in the art of disaster recovery. Our corporate headquarters even lived it firsthand during Hurricane Harvey, and our team worked tirelessly to ensure our clients never missed a beat throughout the disaster. Let our knowledge and expertise be yours. Request a free external vulnerability scan to see how ready you are.