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Protect for Tomorrow’s Disasters, Today

There’s a lot to think about when it comes to ensuring your business critical systems are always online. Dimensions Cloud brings the power of Microsoft Azure’s local datacenters to help ensure your data and critical IT systems are always available — without the expense of secondary infrastructure.

The threat to your business is real.
Are your critical IT systems disaster ready?

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Natural and Localized Disaster

From disasters as floods and earthquakes to incidents as common as office fires, faulty sprinkler equipment or a burst water pipe can all significantly disrupt your team’s ability to maintain the essential operations for running your business. Recovery from such incidents can take days and sometimes weeks depending on the severity of the damage.

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Human Threats - accidents / sabotage

Human errors, whether accidental or intentionally malicious are the second largest cause of data loss and downtime. From accidental deletion of a file, corruption of an entire volume, to disgruntled employees intent on disrupting business, resuming normal operations can be complex, time consuming and most importantly – extremely costly.

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Failure and corruption of IT Systems

The most common types of incidents are failures of IT hardware and software systems such as network, file server and software applications all of which can disrupt your team’s ability to conduct business operations. Depending on the complexity of the systems involved, recovery can take das or even weeks with hardware procurement lead times, restoring from backup and resuming normal operations.

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Cyber threats

Cisco’s 2018 SMB Security survey found that over 53% SMBs experienced a security breach in 2018. 40% these attacks disrupted more than half of the organizations entire IT system estate and led to over 8 hours of down time. Nothing represents a more disruptive threat to business data than cybercrime – and a BCDR strategy can significantly limit the downtime resulting from a breach.

Could your business survive a disaster?
Here’s why most business are still unprepared

We have a reliable backup process in place

A reliable local backup is a great first step to protecting your business’s most valuable assets but leaves your data vulnerable to local disasters such as office flooding or fires and does little to protect your data from human incidents and cyberthreats that cause data loss.

Disaster Recovery is only for major outages or business prone to natural disasters

Office fires, water leaks, equipment failure and cybersecurity threats such as malware and ransomware can all lead to systems going offline for. Recovering from backup can take days and sometimes weeks when factoring in securing a site, securing replacement hardware, rebuilding machines and restoring from backup. Delays which can mean your Business downtime is expensive.

BCDR solutions are expensive and geared to support large enterprises

Cloud based Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) are cost effective and makes it easy to replicate data to multiple locations and get your business up and running faster in the event of an interruption. They represent only a fraction of the cost of productivity, revenue and reputational loss caused by downtime.

We have a reliable backup process in place

Having an established data backup is a great asset for your company. When things go wrong, it’s a relief to know that there is a backup of your critical files. The first step to a robust data backup process is to ensure that multiple versions of the data are stored both on-site AND in the cloud. This helps protect the data from loss in case of an incidents such as office floods or fires. Having multiple versions of the data provides a layer of protection should your data be corrupted due to malware, ransomware or other cyberthreats. However resuming business operations by restoring data from backup can result in days of downtime during incidents such as IT systems failure where hardware must be procured and large amounts of data restored. In more complicated incidents such as office fires, resuming business operations can take weeks until an alternate location is found, systems are sourced and data is recovered.

Disaster Recovery is only for major outages or business prone to natural disasters

The most common threats to service continuity are hardware and software failures, network outages and human error. In fact forty-five percent of service interruptions that went beyond maximum downtime guidelines were caused by software and hardware issues. Only 12% of incidents were caused by major destructive events. This means Disaster Recovery planning needs to focus on overall service continuity, not just major disasters. Ignoring the more frequent but less dramatic causes for service interruption leads can lead to even more disastrous results.

BCDR solutions are expensive and geared to support large enterprises

Traditionally, BCDR readiness involved building or sourcing a second site or location, procuring identical hardware and configuring complex replication software. Resuming operations after a disaster was an equally complicated and error prone task requiring hours of human intervention to move IT operations to the backup site. Cloud computing has made BCDR readiness more accessible for small and medium businesses by eliminating the large up front expenses required to procure hardware, source a secondary site and setup the software required. Cloud resources for BCDR can be provisioned and charged on an OPEX basis at a fraction of the cost of expensive hardware. Additionally, with technology such as Veeam’s Availability Suite have made setting up and configuring a BCDR process for your critical IT systems a simple and cost effective exercise.

An effective BCDR strategy is critical to reducing recovery time and the cost of downtime

Dimensions Cloud can help design, develop, and implement an effective information technology (IT) and telecommunications Disaster Recovery Plan to recover critical IT systems, applications, data, and business processes.

Establish and monitor effective Disaster Recovery SLAs

Establish effective Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and contracts with vendors, suppliers, and service providers for facilities, data, and resources.

Define RTO & RPO Objectives

Identify, evaluate, and select high availability and disaster recovery solutions suitable for Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO).

Define Critical Data And System Requirements

Ensure critical data off-site backup and storage, retrieval, and management requirements are met.

Identify Potential Threats & Vulnerabilities

Conduct a risk assessment and Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to determine threats, vulnerabilities, impacts of disruption to IT infrastructure and business operations and IT and telecommunications recovery time frames, priorities, and resource requirements.

Assemble and train the appropriate BCDR team

Assemble a knowledgeable and effective Disaster Recovery team, and assign appropriate predisaster, disaster, and postdisaster tasks and responsibilities.

Test and optimize your BCDR Strategy

After your migration is complete, our Azure experts can help you test, manage and ensure your environment is ready for when you need it the most.