Andrew Cruise, Managing Director, Routed, South Africa’s only vendor neutral cloud infrastructure provider, says that disaster recovery (DR) and back-up solutions remain key to business strategies for 2019. Cruise says that protecting on-premise and cloud-based data is critical if businesses are wanting the ability to recover all areas and avoid disasters, something he says did not fully resonate with businesses in 2018.
“Despite growing interest, majority of local businesses are yet to fully understand the importance of DR and back-up. Time needs to be spent reviewing what is in place, how and where it can expand and if using new technology will assist in ensuring better delivery in 2019,” says Cruise.
He says that a new trend is to form closer ties between DR and security. While DR traditionally concerns itself with loss of data, applications, systems and locations, the rise of malware and external attacks across networks has placed increased focus on the recovery of these environments and in a secure state: “Solid DR strategies will meet compliance requirements, while also ensuring the recovery of data, specific endpoints and applications,” says Cruise.
With more moves into the cloud, businesses need to make a concerted effort to embrace DR and backup. Cruise says the reality of ownership of the data is key: “This remains the organisation’s responsibility. The onus is on them to find ways in which to protect cloud-based data, this includes using third-party vendors.”
As threats are on the increase, a cloud approach could further protect a network from attack, even act as another layer of defense: “Recovery could potentially be much quicker if the entire system is simply rebooted, as opposed to trying to resume services on the network which experienced the attack,” explains Cruise.
This practice of cloud-based DR provides a much more efficient approach to resuming business functions. Cruise says that Routed hopes businesses will continue to explore DR and back-up solutions, giving serious consideration to cloud-based solutions and services.