Is your data in jeopardy? Do you have a cloud security strategy for recovering data in the event of a ransomware attack, human error, or system failure? These are questions that today’s organizations must ask if they are to avoid costly business disruptions.
The power of the cloud to accelerate business, has made cloud adoption a transformation that most organizations cannot afford to ignore. But the increase in data collection, ever-changing compliance requirements, and advances in AI have given rise to increasingly complex cloud configurations in multicloud, hybrid cloud, and on-premises infrastructures.
Data Integrity: It’s 2 AM…Your IT System Fails…Do You Know Where Your Data Is?
If you are operating with a data protection system that is years, even decades, out of date, you need to consider a new strategy for ensuring business continuity. A failover strategy with business continuity planning includes a reliable, safe, up-to-date, and uncorrupted backup process to restore data in the event of system failure.
Planning for the future means considering every possibility, even worse-case scenarios. Are you prepared for that 2 AM disaster when a ransomware attack makes off with your data or a natural disaster knocks out your system, or human error wipes out your databases? Can you restore data quickly, safely, and accurately without replicating the attack virus or error, or corrupting your data?
A data failure can occur at any time for all kinds of reasons, but the key to a quick recovery is having a reliable backup system to switch to when your primary system fails. Effective failover mechanisms as part of a comprehensive business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan are essential for maintaining business operations and ensuring data integrity during disruptions.
What is data integrity and how can I protect it?
Failover is a critical aspect of maintaining data integrity. It’s not just a tool for protecting and restoring data, it’s a strategy that protects your entire organization by ensuring business continuity.
Data is a mobile asset: it moves around a lot in today’s world, shifting between on-premises and cloud environments, across borders, and from customers to businesses to partners and back to you. All along that data chain, you need to be certain that:
- Privacy of sensitive data is maintained
- Data is not corrupted or lost
- Compliance is ensured
Data integrity means maintaining the accuracy, completeness, consistency, and validity of data over its entire life cycle. If a disaster or error occurs anywhere along your data supply chain, the consequences can seriously impact your business.
The impact of failure: the real costs of data loss
Non-compliance fees in the APAC region can amount to millions of dollars.i Ransomware demands are rising, with four in five APAC organizations reporting an attack on their business.ii Total costs resulting from a ransomware attack could land anywhere between 1 million and 20 million US dollars.iii
How much downtime can your organization afford? Have you made calculations by the minute or the hour on your organization’s tolerance for downtime? Statistics show that 52 percent of APAC organizations would suffer a revenue loss of half a million US dollars per hour due to downtime, and 36 percent reported costs as high as five million.iv
With the stakes this high, a disaster recovery plan with failover strategy could save your business.
The three tiers of data protection: essential to elite business continuity planning
Failover processes are crucial for maintaining data integrity, ensuring that backup systems are synchronized with primary data sources, preventing data corruption, and guaranteeing that recovered data remains accurate and reliable.
Business continuity strategies that include offline storage, data sovereignty, air-gapped and immutable storage, and advanced encryption offer data protection in the face of disruption.
Security Magazine stresses the importance of secure backups in a failover strategy, “Backups should always be immutable, meaning they can’t be changed. They must be verified for integrity and tested for usability—and stored in separate safe locations to avoid the risk of the backup files becoming infected.”v
At ThinkOn, we offer data protection with failover strategies in a 3-Tiered strategy that you can customize to fit your business needs:
- Tier 1: Essential—Your first line of defense in failover protection
- Failover Process: Offsite immutable data archives with basic synchronization ensure that data is securely backed up, maintaining regular updates and validation.
- Data Integrity: Offsite archives help prevent data loss and corruption but may not offer real-time synchronization or the fastest recovery times. Suitable for smaller businesses needing basic data protection.
- Tier 2: Enhanced—An advanced business continuity plan to minimize downtime
- Failover Process: Backup storage that includes real-time VM replication to maintain closer and faster synchronization between primary and backup systems and ensure efficient disaster recovery.
- Data Integrity: Real-time replication enhances data accuracy and reliability by ensuring that backup data closely mirrors the primary data source, leading to more effective recovery with minimal data discrepancies.
- Tier 3: Elite—Comprehensive data backup to ensure seamless continuity
- Failover Process: Full recovery services with comprehensive validation and rapid recovery capabilities, restored security with regulatory compliance.
- Data Integrity: The Elite tier ensures top-tier data integrity with near-instant synchronization and frequent validation. This level provides minimal downtime and reliable data recovery, supporting large enterprises with stringent data integrity and compliance requirements, and managing complex disaster recovery plans across multiple platforms.
A cloud-smart business continuity plan that includes a comprehensive failover disaster recovery strategy takes the risk out of data loss; it’s the hero gives you—and your business—peace of mind. Find out how to build disaster recovery and failover plan today. ThinkOn is here to help.