Disaster Recovery For Startups – Brought to You By the Cloud

Startups are beautiful creatures. They’re fledglings that have not experienced failure. They have not experienced the ups and downs of an established enterprise. With a startup, the world is truly your oyster. The nuggets of future global success are buried within today’s startups.

Disaster Recovery Is About the Big Picture

According to a 2013 survey, 74% of small business owners don’t have a disaster recovery plan. What’s more – 84% don’t have natural disaster insurance and 71% do not have a backup generator. These companies are not looking at the big picture. They’re not prepared for a disaster like Hurricane Harvey. They’re not prepared for earthquakes such as the ones hitting Japan, which totalled $30 billion in damages last year.

Yet the surest way to put a swift end to all the promises of a startup is a disaster. It doesn’t even need to be a big disaster. Lose power for even a few hours (depending on your startup’s tolerance for business interruption) and it might be curtains for you. Lacy, gently waving curtains.

Startups Must Be Forward Thinking.

Startups that hope for longevity must look toward future market trends. These same startups must also look forward to predict which disasters could strike. And most importantly, they must plan how to prevent them.

But it’s hard. Disaster recovery has historically been out of reach for all but the largest enterprises. Not so anymore.

With the cloud, disaster recovery becomes accessible to even the most bootstrapped startup. With that accessibility comes a responsibility. Startups must ensure that they are disaster proof.

Types of Disasters:

• Major disasters.

Major disasters are what you picture when I use the word ‘disaster’. Floods. Fire. Hurricanes. Earthquakes. Landslides. Your local area will be susceptible to some of these more than others. Whatever it is can definitely impact business continuity. For example, total damage from natural disasters alone totalled $175 billion globally last year.

You need to save your backup somewhere that’s not in your primary office. Part of a robust disaster recovery plan is geographical diversity. The chances that a natural disaster will hit two different locations (as long as they are a few hundred kilometres apart) at once is slim. This means that you should be able to recover your backup from a safe second location.

• Hardware failures.

Hardware failures is when a piece of infrastructure goes down. Chances are, this type of failure is something you can anticipate. The culprit is usually ageing infrastructure (which is often left to age because of cost).

• Software glitches and viruses.

Have you heard the phrase ‘ransomware’? That’s when hackers break into your system and virtually hold it for ransom. Software disasters can be something as simple as a software patch that’s updated at the wrong time.

• Human mistakes.

This kind of disaster is often overlooked, because it seems like such a minor occurrence. But it can have a huge impact when it’s exactly the wrong mistake to make. Something simple can be a huge problem if your startup isn’t prepared with a backup plan.

Gambling Your Future is a Thing of the Past

In the past, organisations needed to buy servers, pay additional rent, and employ extra IT staff to have a comprehensive disaster recovery plan. There were many steps where this plan could go wrong too. If a backup failed, it could go undetected until a disaster.

And all those steps are costly, which is why most startups skip a disaster recovery plan all together. Cash-strapped startups can barely afford one server, let alone two, after all.

Cloud technology revolves around the idea of virtualisation. 

Which means that the need to buy duplicative infrastructure and pay rent twice and hire additional IT staff? All out the window. With cloud disaster recovery, startups can create mirrored copies of working operating systems. They can instantly upload new data as it’s created. When the system goes down, it can failover to these mirrored virtual servers. Then work continues as usual until the original server is back up.

In short, cloud disaster recovery reduces the recovery time and the costs associated with disaster recovery. Disaster recovery is not a dream for a future version of your company. It’s a practical plan to begin today.

If you want to see how Macquarie Cloud Services can save your startup from disaster, contact us today.