Andrew Cruise, managing director of Routed, South Africa’s only vendor-neutral cloud infrastructure provider, said disaster recovery (DR) and back-up solutions remain vital to business strategies for 2019
Cruise stated that protecting on-site and cloud-based data is critical if businesses want the ability to recover all areas and avoid disasters, something that did not fully resonate with businesses in 2018.
“Despite growing interest, the majority of local businesses are yet to fully understand the importance of DR and back-up. Time needs to be spent reviewing what is in place, how and where it can expand and if using new technology will assist in ensuring better delivery in 2019,” he explained.
He added that a new trend is to build closer ties between DR and security. While DR traditionally concerns itself with the loss of data, applications, systems and locations, the rise of malware and external attacks across networks has placed greater emphasis on the recovery of these environments and in a secure state: “Solid DR strategies will meet compliance requirements, while also ensuring the recovery of data, specific endpoints and applications,” he continued.
With more moves into the cloud, businesses need to make a concerted effort to embrace DR and backup. “This remains the organisation’s responsibility. The onus is on them to find ways in which to protect cloud-based data, this includes using third-party vendors,” he further added.
As threats are on the increase, a cloud approach could further protect a network from attack, even act as another layer of defence: “Recovery could potentially be much quicker if the entire system is simply rebooted, as opposed to trying to resume services on the network which experienced the attack,” he noted.
This practice of cloud-based DR provides a much more efficient approach to resuming business functions. Cruise concluded that Routed hopes businesses will continue to explore DR and back-up solutions, giving serious consideration to cloud-based solutions and services.
