Azure Disaster Recovery Could Save Your Business. Here’s How.

SMBs today manage an average of 47.81 terabytes of data. If that sounds like a lot, consider that the average enterprise has 347.56 terabytes of data – seven times as much. Companies today need to protect their data for a variety of reasons: to keep their businesses operational, their clients safe, and their financial information and intellectual property protected. Azure Disaster Recovery can help.

Azure Disaster Recovery is an all-in-one solution that can virtualize and protect cloud and hybrid environments. On-prem systems and virtual machines can be redeployed with ease, with their data intact, once a disaster occurs.

The Risks of the Modern Business

Consider a hypothetical SMB – a boutique legal firm with 30 employees and perhaps 500 clients. Their system holds a tremendous amount of information: client data, legal discovery files, emails, and more. While they’ve protected their system using the most secure standards today, what they haven’t done is protect their data from a flood. A seasonal storm blows in and damages all the equipment in the office.

Since legal firms need to manage their privacy, a significant amount of their data is likely to be held on-prem rather than on their cloud servers. With a traditional setup, their hybrid system may be in fragments now: They may not have backups available for their on-prem work, or their backups may have been held within the exact same physical space as their servers.

Working Without Data

Because many businesses use Software-as-a-Service solutions and a mix of cloud and hybrid solutions, work grinds to a halt when data is missing. At this hypothetical legal firm, employees may be able to access their contact lists, but may not be able to access their prior communications. They may not be able to access any of the e-Discovery information that they were combing through, causing their cases to lag behind. Ultimately, that leads to a loss of faith on the part of their clients, and leads to costly delays.

Without Azure backup disaster recovery, the firm would now have the unenviable task of sending in its hard drives for data recovery. They would need to physically send their platters in, likely to a clean room, for the data to be restored. And there’s no telling whether the data would be discovered or not: It depends completely on how extensive the damage is. It’s likely they would find themselves having to reconstruct work, potentially spending tens of thousands more on work hours.

How Azure Disaster Recovery Changes the Game

But consider a different scenario. In this scenario, the firm wasn’t using on-prem backup disaster recovery. Instead, they were using Azure Disaster Recovery. The storm may have destroyed their local data, but not their Azure Disaster Recovery backups.

Within minutes, Azure Disaster Recovery can be used to redeploy images of the firm’s data as it was before the storm even occurred. In fact, the firm might not lose any information at all. Once the firm sets up its local workstations, it will be able to continue its work virtually without disruption at all.

Being able to redeploy data this quickly means a company can potentially save millions of dollars. The firm is able to successfully avoid business interruption, keep its clients happy, and make sure that its case files continue to move forward rather than becoming bottlenecked.

These things remain true even if you change the industry. Consider:

• A construction company hit by ransomware. All its contracts, building information modeling, financial information, and technical data will be irretrievable unless it is able to restore its information from its backups. If the company’s backups were on its network, then the backups, too, might have been consumed by ransomware. With Azure Disaster Recovery, the backups will be safe and available.
• An advertising company with work lost due to the actions of a malicious employee. Even if the work is over-written or intentionally deleted, Azure Disaster Recovery can be used to redeploy the information to the state that it was before. Security settings on Azure Disaster Recovery will prevent malicious employees from accessing or deleting the data.

Whenever a company needs to restore its data, Azure’s data backup services are able to help. And ADR is able to protect data from issues that could plague traditional backup and restoration systems.

Transitioning to Azure Data Backup Services

As you can see, companies are able to quickly resume work thanks to ADR, and that’s why Azure Disaster Recovery is such a critical component for the modern business. But making a transition to a new solution isn’t always easy, especially if a company already has different disaster recovery solutions in place. A managed services provider can help an organization easily transition to Azure Disaster Recovery – and start protecting their data and operations today.

Do you want to learn more about the advantages of Azure Disaster Recovery? Contact the experts at Red River today.