As digitalization takes stride in full fruition, disaster has become much more of a recurring phenomena. Enterprises today are incredibly vulnerable to malicious attacks and threats. Advances in the technology are emerging in the world, and businesses are starting to cope with the newfound digital dependency. One of the biggest challenges that they are facing when trying to do so comes from countering the simultaneously evolving cyber threats.
Cyber Risks
Cyber risks refer to any risk of financial loss, reputation damage, or dysfunction to an organization’s reputation. This damage occurs due to prevalent failures and breaches to an organizations central information systems. Experts often measure the scale of these risks by evaluating the money lost during and after a cyber event, or “disaster”.
Cyber Risk Management
Risk management in the digital realm involves the steps businesses have to take to prevent, prepare and reduce the possible situations that can occur. There are three broad types of risk that can lead to a disaster.
The first involves human risks, which include human error. Disaster does not always come from malicious intent. It can also come from an unintentional mistake from a representative within an institution.
Businesses must prepare for these types of disasters because humans are not flawless, and you should always expect errors from your worker. These errors are most of the times easily recoverable, but they can also be detrimental to a business’s reputation.
The second type of risk involves the unwanted occurrence of fires, floods and earthquakes, while the third can involve technical risks such as hardware failure. All hardware components have a lifespan, and if you are running low maintenance components past their lifespan, then changes of technical failure are high.
AWS for Security
Amazon Web Services or AWS is a leading player in the cloud computing market. First introduced in 2002, as service and tool provider for developers, it stands today as primary cloud computing provider to many businesses around the world. 45% of the global market relies on AWS for cloud computing solutions. AWS provides many cloud-based options, one of them being security.
Disaster Recovery with AWS
Today, almost all businesses are running mission critical applications, and this often means that you need to put a disaster recovery plan in place for your workloads. Secondly, if you still have plenty of infrastructures on premise, it is best that you move that physical structure to the virtual cloud. A disaster recovery plan is the strategy you put in place to mitigate the costs of a disaster.
Cloud is becoming the preferred choice of disaster recovery due to the economic benefits it provides. It also makes it possible for businesses to integrate disaster recovery to more protocols, applications and systems. Nonetheless, disaster recovery solutions can look very different depending on your requirements and needs.
Defining Your Needs
The first stage of deployment is simple as it involves identifying the applications that you want to protect, and to define the type of protection that you wish to provide for them. It is helpful to do a business impact analysis so that you can determine what disaster recovery is worth to your business. Analysis also gives you an idea of the cost targets that you want to work with.
Defining Objectives – RTOs and RPOs
Once you get an idea of the cost targets, you can use them as a point of reference to set recovery time and recovery point objectives. A recovery point defines the maximum data loss for an application that is acceptable and tolerable. Furthermore, a recovery time objective on the other hand is the maximum time that it takes between disaster and recovery that is acceptable.
The recovery point is sometimes before the disaster even occurs. When you set a recovery point objective, the expectation is that all data struck by disaster should be recoverable in a disaster. If you look at it in another way, when a disaster strikes, you can expect that you will lose the data between the recovery point and time of disaster.
A recovery time objective defines the amount of downtime, or system halt that you are willing to accept for your business. This also tells you quickly you need to have the application or system back online. As your RTOs and RPOs grow smaller, they can become more complicated and costly. This is why it is important to combine your applications with the right type of recovery.
Immediate Cloud Backup Benefits
Moving to the cloud is very common for deploying quick data backups. One of the reasons is because it’s infrastructure that you already put in place to manage on-premise backups can be utilized to support your cloud backups. You can utilize the existing backup applications and workflows with little modifications. With the help of AWS, instead of pointing to a disk based target, you will be relying on a cloud based target, for example Amazon S3.
Additionally, you get to leverage from cost effective off-site storage alternatives. This means that you can separate your backup data from your primary data with no incremental or upfront investment. This is because Amazon allows you to benefit from pay-as-you-go pricing. This pricing method is incredibly cost effective when you are getting started.
Having backup also means that you can benefit from having a discrete workload. It is not an active workload, which means that there are no applications depending on it at that point in time. This means that it is easier to do POCs trial, getting the workloads into the cloud.
If you are running tape, then just the elimination of the infrastructure will be prone to failure and have high maintenance costs. Overall, having your data in the cloud will allow you access to all the other services of AWS. These services will help support your data analytics and understanding of the data.
Use AWS with the help of VAST!
To seamlessly integrate the AWS services and disaster recovery into your business properties, you will the help of a third party service provider to properly develop and deploy your cloud strategy. This is where VAST Services comes into play. We will help you identify the DR methods that your businesses specifically needs, and the best deployment tactics for a lasting and cost effective outcome.
