Disaster recovery planning should be an essential undertaking for all organizations that rely on their IT systems. Disaster recovery (DR) has always been an important aspect of maintaining an IT environment but it has become increasingly consequential in enabling companies to address the prevalence of cyber attacks, specifically ransomware. A company without a viable DR plan is playing with fire and taking a chance of getting badly burned.
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery offers businesses of all sizes a cost-effective and powerful method of protecting their IT environment and valuable data from ransomware attacks. It’s an excellent solution that enables small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to protect themselves from threat actors. VAST IT Services provides support for its customers in planning and implementing AWS Elastic DR.
How Does Ransomware Affect Small Businesses?
Small business owners need to be aware of the risks ransomware poses to their organization. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has sounded a warning that businesses of all sizes are susceptible to ransomware attacks. They point to statistics gathered by the Ransomware Taskforce that estimates small businesses were the target of 70% of reported ransomware attacks in 2021.
Up to 25% of companies experiencing a ransomware attack are forced to close and shut down business operations. An organization can fall victim to a devastating ransomware attack at any time. A single mistake where an employee accidentally clicks on a malicious link presented as part of a phishing campaign is all it takes. Mission-critical systems can be affected making enterprise data resources unavailable, disrupting internal operations and the ability to service customers.
If you value your business, you need to be prepared for a ransomware attack. Developing and testing a reliable disaster recovery plan is virtually mandatory for companies operating in today’s landscape of sophisticated cyber threats. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery provides SMBs with an efficient method of implementing a comprehensive disaster recovery plan.
What is AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery?
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (EDR) is an offering from Amazon that is designed to help businesses minimize downtime and data loss. The platform accomplishes this goal by enabling fast and reliable recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications. The solution includes point-in-time recovery capabilities while consuming minimal compute resources and using affordable AWS storage.
Organizations configure AWS EDR on their source systems and then replicate their data to a staging area in the company’s AWS account. The staging area can be in any AWS Region for increased resiliency. The use of the staging area allows AWS to minimize costs by controlling storage and compute resources. Customers can monitor ongoing replication to ensure their data is protected and available for recovery.
IT teams can conduct non-disruptive tests to verify the EDR implementation and recovery readiness. When applications are launched for recovery, they are automatically converted to run natively on AWS infrastructure. Recovery instances can be launched within minutes using either a previous point in time or the server’s most recent state. Customers can choose to continue running their applications on AWS or replicate them back to a primary site at any time.
What are the Business Benefits of AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery?
Companies can expect to enjoy multiple business benefits by choosing to protect their computing environment with AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery. Following are some of the most impactful benefits of using AWS EDR to safeguard a business from ransomware and other types of destructive cyber attacks.
- Using the cloud resources available from AWS eliminates the need to maintain a dedicated off-premises recovery site. This provides substantial cost savings for the organization as they only pay for the full recovery site when it is needed. Using cloud resources as a recovery site also eliminates the time and expense involved in having key personnel travel to the recovery site after a disaster.
- Unexpected downtime is extremely expensive for SMBs and every hour counts when a recovery is required. The costs can quickly run into the millions as business systems are unable to service customers. AWS EDR protects your business by minimizing downtime. Applications can be recovered in minutes without the complications of transporting offsite backups to the recovery site. Business-critical systems can be rapidly recovered to reduce downtime and restore operations.
- Flexible recovery options are possible due to the continuous data replication provided by AWS ERD. User-defined settings are used to configure data replication to ensure all information is kept updated on secure AWS storage. Customers can choose to recover to specific points in time or to the most recent system state to address specific recovery scenarios.
- The cost of storing backups is reduced by replacing offsite backup media with affordable AWS storage. Additional costs are saved by eliminating the process of shipping backups offsite and returning the media when the data on them has expired. All that is required for backing up enterprise data is reliable connectivity to the cloud.
- The ability to perform and test recovery processes without impacting the reproduction environment is instrumental in developing an effective disaster recovery plan. AWS makes it easy to conduct tests and recoveries with no specialized skillset.
- Recovering systems to the cloud makes them immediately accessible to employees and customers. Employees don’t have to travel to an alternate work site to keep the business running. Productivity and customer satisfaction can be greatly enhanced with a cloud-based disaster recovery solution like AWS EDR.
How VAST Helps Your Business Implement AWS Elastic DR
VAST has your back when it comes to protecting your business and your valuable data assets with backup solutions, data protection tools, and disaster recovery planning. The strategic partnership VAST has formed with AWS makes them an excellent third party to help your business take advantage of the benefits of AWS EDR.
The experts at VAST will help your business protect itself from ransomware and threat actors with a comprehensive disaster recovery plan built around AWS EDR. They will work with you to develop a high-availability disaster recovery solution that addresses the unique needs of your business. Give VAST a call today and start protecting your business and customers from downtime and data loss.
