What types of businesses need a disaster recovery plan?

There was a time when only large corporations worried about disasters and developed disaster recovery (DR) plans. But those days are long gone. Whether your business is a global organization or a five-person shop, developing a company disaster recovery plan is a must. 

If you work for a small-to-medium-sized business (SMB), you are probably wondering how your organization can afford the talent, time, and budget to develop and execute a DR plan. Read on and discover how.

There are four types of DR plans. Some are appropriate for larger (enterprise) organizations, while other DR plans work best for medium and small companies.

Virtualized Disaster Recovery Plan. With this type of DR plan, your IT staff creates a replica of your IT infrastructure and stores it on an off-site Virtual Machine (VM). VMs are hardware-independent, so you can easily back up your systems and data to dissimilar hardware. When a disaster happens, you fail over your IT operations to the off-site VM and recover from a disaster in just a few minutes. 

Network Disaster Recovery Plan. This type of plan includes procedures for recovering an organization’s network operations – including local area networks (LANs), wide-area networks (WANs), and wireless networks – when an unplanned network service interruption happens., 

Cloud Disaster Recovery Plan. With this type of plan, you back up your systems and data to a private or public cloud. When a disaster happens, you can easily fail over IT operations to the secondary site and fail back to new, similar, or dissimilar hardware. Public cloud DR services, also called disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), are available on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Data Center Disaster Recovery Plan. This type of plan requires your organization to set up a separate facility, located at least 150 miles from your primary site, used when a disaster happens. There are three types of data center disaster recovery plans.

• A cold disaster recovery site is an office or data center – located away from the primary site – that has power, heat, air conditioning, etc. but no running IT systems. Depending on the length of the disaster, an organization may install the necessary systems after the disaster hits. 
• A warm disaster recovery site offers office space and technology infrastructure used only when a disaster hits the primary site. A warm site has power, heat, air conditioning, network connectivity, and redundant hardware andsoftware already up and running. Backups from the primary to the warm site are performed on a daily or weekly basis, which can lengthen your recovery point objective (RPO) and result in some data loss. 
• A hot disaster recovery site offers office space and a complete replica of the primary site’s IT infrastructure, systems, applications, and up-to-date data. This is the most expensive type of DR site.

The following table highlights the appropriate plan for your business based on company size, anticipated business requirements, and affordability.

A cloud DR plan, such as DRaaS, is the most cost-efficient business disaster recovery plan for a small-to-medium-sized business.  

Regardless of your company size, Acronis has built a way for you to provide your organization with a first-class disaster recovery program.

For larger organizations that prefer to handle DR in-house, Acronis Cyber Disaster Recovery ensures business continuity and instant availability with quick failover to the cloud. Quick and easy to deploy, the solution requires no training because it is built on Acronis Cyber Backup and provides an all-in-one backup, disaster recovery, and advanced ransomware protection.

Many SMBs prefer to outsource their administrative DR efforts and work with managed service providers (MSPs) that deliver and administer DR services. Many of these MSPs offer managed DR services built on Acronis’ disaster recovery solution. Why? Many MSPs already offer Acronis backup and can simply add disaster recovery in a matter of minutes. This provides you with backups that protect your data, applications, and systems and when a disaster strikes, you can spin up your IT systems in the cloud to keep your operations running. After the disaster passes, you can easily recover to the same, new, or dissimilar hardware.