Essential Disaster Recovery Capabilities for Business Continuity Management

Business continuity management involves keeping tabs on a number of components needed to keep a business up and running during a disaster event. On the IT side of things, this mainly revolves around backing up, safeguarding, and restoring enterprise data and workloads.

One of the most essential parts of a robust and ultimately effective business continuity plan is the disaster recovery plan. After all, a business may do all it can to protect itself from a disaster event—such as a ransomware attack, a cloud outage, or corrupted data—but it still needs a failsafe plan for how it will restore data and workloads in the event of any disruption that nevertheless occurs.

What is Disaster Recovery?

Although “disaster recovery” is a term often used interchangeably with “business continuity,” it is actually a subset of business continuity management that mainly involves restoring crucial data and operations while minimizing any downtime caused by a disaster event.

Having a disaster recovery plan in place is essential for any enterprise. Without one, the aftermath of a disaster can spiral out of control and leave a business vulnerable to permanent data loss and disruption to operations that eventually affect everything from revenue to customers.

Cloud Backup and Optimizing Disaster Recovery

An enterprise’s disaster recovery plan should include a way to identify all mission-critical data that should be prioritized during a restore, along with a way to quickly recover and restore lost data from backups — all while still keeping essential operations afloat during recovery. This is in addition to identifying the suitable number of backups needed to meet the recovery point objective (RPO) while avoiding excessive costs from unneeded backups creation and storage.

This all starts with using cloud backup-as-a-service to continually replicate and store enterprise data. Here are three disaster recovery capabilities to look for in a cloud backup-as-a-service solution that will provide profound advantages during disaster recovery:

Incremental Forever Backup

Incremental forever backup is a type of incremental backup that uses a method called changed block recovery. This streamlines the restoration process, saving IT teams from having to go through backups and figure out which copies need to be restored in order to recover the most current data.

Incremental forever backup expedites the restoration process by restoring only the latest versions of blocks that belong to a restored backup, resulting in significantly faster restores.

Granular Recovery

During disaster recovery, the actual speed of data restoration is at the core of an organization’s RTO. However, during recovery, some data is more important than other data — particularly the mission-critical data and processes that the organization needs to remain operational while full recovery is in progress. Restoring an entire instance can be time-consuming and may put business continuity at risk.

Granular recovery capability is the solution to this glaring issue, as it enables IT teams to initiate both file- and record-level recovery from a single pass backup operation instead of waiting on a full instance restore. This makes it possible to identify and prioritize specific mission-critical data and workloads to keep essential processes and operations functional while drastically speeding up recovery.

Flexible Recovery

Flexible recovery is another beneficial capability to have in your disaster recovery plan via your cloud backup solution. With flexible recovery, you can recover to any account or region that has not been compromised by the disaster event, and quickly resume operations.

Industry-Leading Disaster Recovery with Clumio

Built in the cloud, Clumio supports optimized business continuity management and disaster recovery with capabilities such as granular recovery, incremental forever backup, flexible recovery, and more. Clumio’s industry-leading rapid restore capabilities provide enterprises of all sizes with lightning-quick data restores that can maintain and support business continuity in the face of a disaster event.

Along with optimized disaster recovery features, Clumio also provides:

• Instant backups of AWS data from any region across your entire organization
• Protection from ransomware and other malicious attacks with air-gapped backups
• Simplified data compliance with global policies
• Flexible pay-as-you-go consumption model
• Cost-savings via in-depth insights into enterprise cloud spend

Clumio is the industry’s leading innovator for AWS cloud backup. Click here to schedule a demo to see Clumio in action and learn how your business can get up and running with Clumio in under 15 minutes — no new infrastructure, software, or pre-planning beforehand required.