5 Reasons You Need a Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan

Data is growing faster than ever, and protecting it is becoming increasingly complex. In 2023, organizations will generate nearly 3 times the volume of data generated in 2019. The total data created will reach 181ZB by 2025. How can all this data be protected?

Data loss can result in downtime and lost revenue in addition to the loss of crucial files and information. Important data can be lost because of unforeseen events like natural disasters, cyberthreats, hardware failure, and human error. Ensuring business resilience requires a robust and tested backup and disaster recovery plan.

Costs represent just one of the reasons all businesses need a backup and disaster recovery plan, but there are other reasons to consider implementing this critical action:

1. Broad range of threats

Anywhere there is data, there are threats to that data. Data is a valuable component of running a business, and it is vulnerable to a number of threats that can lead to data leaks and data loss. These include physical device damage, human threats, technical threats, and natural disasters. You’ve likely done your due diligence to protect against many of these, but any vulnerability could put your data in jeopardy, making it vital that you have a plan to help you navigate around any disasters or data losses that occur.

2. Security measures fail

Even the strongest and most considered security measures can fail, letting in viruses that can do your business harm. Ransomware viruses are known to withhold a victim’s data in exchange for a ransom payment. However, handing ransom over to cybercriminals may not restore your data and is discouraged, as it supports future attacks. Instead, with the proper backup and disaster recovery plan, you can secure your data in the cloud, where you can retrieve uninfected versions of the data that was taken and restore it to a new device, or your original version that is now clean.

3. Productivity losses

If you rely on the data within your organization to run your business, then your productivity will suffer if that data is lost. The longer your data goes without being recovered, the longer your employees will be unable to perform. When this occurs for a longer period of time, profits can suffer as a result.

4. Costs

Unorganized, last-minute attempts to recover lost data quickly can be expensive. However, by planning and preparing ahead for the eventuality of data loss, you can act quickly without sacrificing a substantial budget to the recovery process, and with fewer productivity related losses. With a plan in hand, you can limit the length of time your business is affected by data loss or another disaster, and therefore limit the scope of the damage.

5. Permanent data loss

Without a data backup and disaster recovery plan, you may be unable to retrieve the data that was lost. Your ability to retrieve data greatly relies on the actions you’ve taken to fortify that data for retrieval. This includes creating data backups not only on physical storage devices—where they are still vulnerable to any number of the threats listed above—but also with a cloud backup service so that backups may be retrieved quickly and efficiently, no matter how they were lost or altered.

Finding the Right Solution

Many organizations don’t identify critical vulnerabilities in their existing data protection methods until disaster strikes. By then, it’s too late. Using Zerto and HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery together enables a highly secure, scalable, cost-effective solution for ransomware resilience and composable data protection. By radically reducing data loss and downtime, you can mitigate risk and stay in compliance no matter where applications live across their entire hybrid cloud estate. Composable data protection enables enterprises to build a highly tailored DR and backup strategy for their applications using the wide portfolio of data protection with HPE GreenLake and Zerto. This is all done with:

• Continuous data protection with unique journaling and app-centric recovery
• Simple SaaS-based backup with long-term retention on air-gapped and immutable storage
• Unmatched data efficiency that reduces storage consumption by 5–8x compared to backup alternatives, with no extra cloud fees for egress

Make sure to read our “Data Protection Buyers Guide” to ensure you choose the right solution: the one that best fits your data protection strategy and requirements.

And, see how HPE and Zerto can deliver data protection to your organization.

Sarah Doherty
Senior Product Marketing Manager