From RTO to DRaaS, the answers business leaders need going into hurricane season.
June marks the official start of hurricane season, which makes it the perfect time to take an honest look at your organization’s disaster recovery (DR) readiness. We get a lot of questions from clients this time of year, so we figured we’d put the most common ones in one place.
Here’s what business leaders of all industries are asking us right now, and what we’re telling them.
What’s the difference between a backup and a disaster recovery plan?
A backup is a copy of your data. A disaster recovery plan is what gets your business operating again.
That distinction matters. If your office floods and you have backups, that’s great… but who is restoring them? To what hardware? In what order? How long will it take? And how will your employees access systems in the meantime?
A backup answers, “Can we recover the data?” A DR plan answers, “Can we recover the business?” Both are necessary, but they aren’t the same thing.
How is hurricane season different from other types of “disaster”?
Hurricanes are slow-moving (relatively speaking), which is both good news and bad. The good news: you usually have several days of warning. The bad news: that creates a false sense of preparedness, because the time between “the storm is coming” and “the power is out” tends to disappear quickly when half your team is also boarding up their homes.
It also creates compounding risks. Power outages knock out on-prem servers. Flooding takes out hardware. Cell networks get overloaded. ISPs go down. Employees can’t get to the office. And as we covered in our recent post on cybercriminal activity, threat actors love a distracted target.
A solid hurricane DR plan treats all of those as simultaneous problems, not sequential ones.
What are RTO and RPO, and why does everyone keep asking about them?
RTO is your Recovery Time Objective, the maximum time your business can be down before it really starts to hurt.
RPO is your Recovery Point Objective, the maximum amount of data you can afford to lose. A four-hour RPO means that in a worst-case scenario, you could lose up to four hours of transactions, records or work product.
Most organizations significantly underestimate the cost of long RTOs and loose RPOs. When we sit down with clients to calculate downtime cost (lost revenue, payroll, recovery labor, reputational damage, missed SLAs), the numbers tend to be eye-opening, and they usually justify the investment in tighter, cloud-based recovery.
Do we really need DR if everything is already in the cloud?
Short answer: yes!
Longer answer: cloud infrastructure is resilient, but it’s not magic. Cloud regions go down. Misconfigurations can wipe data. Account takeovers happen. And many “cloud” deployments still depend on on-prem connectivity, on-prem identity or hybrid pieces that can absolutely be taken out by a regional event.
Cloud DR is fantastic when it’s designed thoughtfully. But “we’re in the cloud” is not a disaster recovery strategy by itself.
What is DRaaS, and how is it different from what we’re probably doing today?
Disaster Recovery as a Service, or DRaaS, is exactly what it sounds like: a managed service that replicates your critical systems and data to a secure, geographically separated environment in near real time. If something takes out your primary site, your workloads come back online from the recovery environment, often within hours.
What makes DRaaS different from rolling your own DR is that you aren’t maintaining the recovery infrastructure, the replication tooling, the testing schedule or the runbooks alone. You have a partner doing the heavy lifting with you. Our solutions are built on enterprise-grade technologies (Zerto and Veeam) and hosted in SOC 2 Type II-certified facilities, so you get the resilience without staffing up a parallel data center.
When should we start planning for hurricane season?
Honestly? March. But since that’s behind us, anytime during June is your next-best starting point.
The good news: a meaningful DR upgrade doesn’t have to take six months. A focused assessment, a clear set of priorities and a partner who has done this before can get you significantly more protected in a matter of weeks.
If you’d like to make sure your team is genuinely hurricane-ready (not just “we have backups somewhere” ready), our experts are here to help. Don’t wait for the cone of uncertainty to point at your office to find out where the gaps are. We’ve got your back!
