- How Can Disaster Recovery Services Help Businesses During a Natural Disaster?
When Typhoon Haiyan ripped through the Philippines earlier this month, it caused an estimated 70-90 percent structural damage in some areas, and practically wiping out the city of Tacloban. Thankfully, thanks to an early warning system, many high-risk areas were evacuated which significantly reduced the death toll. However, no amount of warning during a natural disaster could save the Philippines from the approximately $US 1.1 billion in damages that Haiyan caused.
What most people don’t consider is how severely a natural disaster affects local businesses, sometimes even for years after. On top of the physical damage that a disaster like a typhoon can cause, there is also the risk of the loss of critical data that businesses require to maintain day-to-day operations. If businesses can’t function, the time it takes for the economy to rebound after a disaster is greatly increased.
This is where Disaster Recovery Services come in handy.
Natural disaster recovery services refer to services aimed at enabling data backup, recovery, and retrieval. They can help enterprises archive mission- or business-critical data files during the occurrence of a natural disaster, such as floods, hurricanes, tornados, or even a sudden and unforeseen system failure. As data are an integral part of many business operations, securing them requires efficient and effective deployment of disaster recovery services.
The services are of two types: hot site and cold site.
- Hot site deployment is where the entire setup of the primary infrastructure is duplicated and is a more expensive option.
- Cold site deployment refers to the deployment of the IT infrastructure in a remote location. These systems take a backup of business-critical data on a weekly or monthly basis.
The number of natural disasters affecting almost all parts of the world has steadily increased in recent decades. The overall number for all natural disaste types registered in 2012 was 357 compared to 78 in 1970. According to statistics and predictions, more of them will follow in the coming years. At the time of such disasters, downtime forces businesses to suspend their operations, thus incurring losses. This increases the need for companies to adopt disaster recovery services which is why the market is expected to post a CAGR of 11.18 percent for the 2012-2016 period.
Business continuity helps enterprises to continue with their business operations during a natural disaster, whereas disaster recovery refers to the restoration of the IT infrastructure following a natural disaster. Hence, the goal of disaster recovery services is to resolve the issue, while that of business continuity is to help enterprises continue with business operations during crises. Both of these are put into action simultaneously during any man-made or natural disaster.
The following flow diagram illustrates the disaster recovery and business continuity process:
In addition, with the increase in technological advancements, there is an increasing emergence of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), in which the cloud replaces the physical IT infrastructure and data centers. With increasing demand for disaster recovery services to protect the data against potential threats such as floods, earthquakes, and system failures, adoption of DRaaS has also increased. DRaaS provides excellent data storage, data archival, and online retrieval features for seamless business operation.
Organizations that lack disaster recovery expertise among their resources can leverage the proficiency of a third-party disaster recovery provider. At the time of an actual disaster, the provider which is at a remote location is less likely to be affected by the same disaster, allowing the provider to manage efficiently at the time of the hazard.
Furthermore, with the increase in adoption of hybrid cloud, SMEs have found that applying this to natural disaster recovery brings huge benefits. Businesses for years now have been crippled by the challenges of using tape and disk backup. Thus, small and medium-sized businesses are expected to increasingly embrace hybrid cloud disaster recovery in the forecast period. Hybrid cloud disaster recovery is a combination of on-site hardware and software with cloud-based recovery.
The adoption of hybrid cloud disaster recovery by businesses will eliminate the need for a secondary disaster recovery site. Moreover it will also reduce the expenses and complexities of managing and maintaining such a system, in turn driving market growth in the years to come.
For more information, view our 2012-2016 Global Disaster Recovery Services Market report.
