The digital world and the natural world are constantly plagued by disasters. So what can an enterprise do to defend itself – at least against digital attacks? For starters, not depend on ancient and weak methods of disaster recovery that cannot compete with the magnitude of issues occurring in a hybrid-cloud ecosystem. Today, businesses need a strong mix of agility, resilience, and automation to meet the compliance and uptime demands.
Cascading Costs of Downtime
It’s the era of social media, digital everything, and instant gratification. All business have to have an always-on approach, where even a single minute of downtime leads to substantial financial loss and reputational damage. When India’s overall average cost of a data breach has hit ₹220 million (approximately $2.7 million in USD) just this year, it’s unsurprising that the disaster recovery will scale up to match or exceed this number.
In India and ASEAN, digitisation is booming, making the cost of downtime even more damaging to organisations. That’s just the first loss of downtime – soon after, businesses lose customer faith, incur regulatory fines, affect their supply chains, and lose out to competitors. Overall, recovery can take anywhere between months to years after such pitfalls.
Why Traditional DR Falls Short
Times have changed, and traditional disaster recovery systems cannot meet the demands of today’s infrastructure with their on-premises functioning, predictable failure modes, and weekly backup windows.
Aspect | Traditional DR | Modern DR |
Recovery Speed & Automation | Slow recovery (hours to days), manual failover prone to human error | Rapid recovery (minutes), fully automated orchestration reduces errors |
Infrastructure & Scalability | On-premises, limited scalability, high capital costs | Cloud-based, highly scalable, pay-as-you-go model |
Cost & Flexibility | High upfront costs, less flexible | Lower upfront costs, supports hybrid and multi-cloud environments |
Testing, Compliance & Management | Periodic, manual testing, complex compliance reporting | Continuous automated testing, built-in compliance, simplified management |
The New DR Priorities
Future-ready enterprises have strong understanding that they need to restructure their disaster recovery systems based on four principles.
- Resilience: There’s no room for duplicating everything anymore. Instead, it is time to build systems that absorb failures, auto fix themselves, and continue operations even when failures hit. Such automated systems need applications that have fault tolerance and graceful degradation.
- Automation: Everything today rests on automation, and disaster recovery needs to stay up to the mark to reduce manual downtime. This eliminates the possibilities of human error during high-stress incidents and ensures continued executions of recovery workflows across hybrid cloud environments.
- Portability: Since the work environment is diverse and spread across hybrid cloud systems, the DR methods need the ability to fail over workloads across on-premises data centre, public cloud systems, and edge locations. Such specific requirements need an infrastructure-agnostic design that also has standardised deployment patterns.
- Recovery: Organisations that have an automated cloud-native DR system in place recover much quicker than traditional systems. These systems employ infrastructure-as-code, immutable infrastructure, and API-based design to make sure there’s rapid and repeatable recovery at scale.
How Enterprises Can Move Forward
Modernizing disaster recovery for the hybrid-cloud era requires strategic action across technology, process, and culture.
Step 1: Integrate cloud-native DR into business planning.
No place like the foundation to begin, so build your cloud-native DR system right into the business continuity framework from the beginning. Involve your stakeholders in the defining of RTOs and RPOs, mapping the dependencies of applications and business processes, and making sure that the DR capabilities keep changing along with your application portfolios.
Step 2: Adopt automated orchestration.
Automation for the win – especially when they provide you with centralised visibility across all your hybrid cloud systems, failover and failback procedures, non-disruptive techniques, and runbook automation that codifies tribal knowledge.
Step 3: Implement continuous validation.
Yearly DR tests will disrupt your operations. Modern approaches to DR, however, employ automated testing in isolated environments, allowing you to gain real-time insights into system resilience with chaos engineering experiments that inject controlled failures.
Step 4: Build for workload mobility.
Containerisation, infrastructure-as-code, standardised common deployment patterns across environments, and service mesh architectures enable seamless workload migration.
Step 5: Foster resilience.
Having the technology in place isn’t enough. Conducting regular planned drills for disaster recovery, rewarding your teams for proactive vulnerability identification, and celebrating the learning through failures rather than punishing them will go a long way in ensuring resilience against disasters and threats.
Understanding the urgency for DR: Not "What If" But "When"
It’s clear that there’s no business or enterprise that is safe from disasters now. The question has shifted from whether there will be an attack to how quickly can one’s business recover.
Hybrid-cloud systems require agility and efficiency. If you’re still following archaic methods of disaster recovery, you will find yourself stuck in prolonged outages, financial and credibility losses with every hour.
Applying the four modern principles of disaster recovery systems can take your business safely across disaster events, cybersecurity breaches, and more. You can use your automation, resilience, and cloud-native recovery methods to turn operational resilience into an advantage.
Find your footing against competitors with the fastest recovery capabilities, organisational muscle memory to work under pressure, and the most resilient systems.
To level up your disaster recovery and business continuity systems before the next disaster strikes, reach out to us today.
