From crisis to continuity.
Small and medium enterprises- SMEs today depend on digital technology to run their businesses. Disaster recovery and business continuity planning are an essential component of preparing your business for a disaster and ensuring it can keep operating should something go wrong says Product Manager, Cloud & IoT at Nashua, Clement Sibiya.
According to Sibiya, “Malware, power outages, hardware failures, and disasters like floods and fires represent only a handful of scenarios that could result in the loss of access to your computer systems and the valuable data they hold. The repercussions can be severe, encompassing business operation disruptions, cash flow interruptions, long-term customer loss, permanent loss of critical business data, and significant expenses for system repair and restoration.“
Disaster recovery versus business continuity
“The terms ‘disaster recovery’ and ‘business continuity’ are sometimes used interchangeably. Although they are closely linked, they don’t mean the same thing. Disaster recovery refers to the recovery of your IT systems and data in the event of an unforeseen event. It’s a plan to get your network, computers, applications, and other IT components to keep functioning when something goes wrong.” he says
“Business continuity, on the other hand, is about ensuring that your business can continue operations following a disaster such as a fire, pandemic, or a cyber-attack. ICT is an essential element of business continuity, but there are also other components such as procedures for your team to follow, alternative places to work when the office isn’t accessible, and communication plans for customers and colleagues.” he adds
The role of the cloud
“To ensure continuity and recovery in the past, businesses would need to take burdensome steps such as running a second server room offsite and mirroring their data to that site. Smaller businesses would have needed to back up their data to an external hard drive. It was not unusual for employees to forget to back up their data or to lose hours of work due to a hard drive failure or a power outage.” says Sibiya
“The advent of the cloud has changed this. SMEs that still prefer to manage their data centers can choose from a range of storage, backup, and disaster recovery-as-a-service options that enable them to seamlessly and automatically back up their data to the cloud. This significantly reduces the costs and operational overhead of maintaining a redundant and resilient ICT infrastructure.” he says
“These days, it’s not necessarily enough to have just one set of backups. The recommendation is for SMEs to ensure they have separate backups in case of a ransomware attack. Ransomware attackers target backup systems first to prevent you from restoring your data. Best practice is to create three copies—two onsite, one offsite—to ensure the business can recover from an attack.” adds Sibiya
SaaS and continuous operations
“We are also increasingly seeing SMEs opt to move their entire ICT setup to the cloud. They are, for example, leveraging cloud-based infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) packages that automate data backup. The benefit of this approach is that most cloud providers have invested in levels of security and uptime no SME could achieve on its own.” continues Sibiya
Insurance for your operations
He concludes by saying, “Due to the high costs and complexity of redundant backups and systems in the past, many SMEs were reluctant to make heavy investments in disaster recovery. However, backup-as-a-service, remote backup, and cloud-based software now allow you to safeguard your business operations at an affordable cost. There is no reason to take the risk of losing production or data anymore.”
 The post The Role of Cloud Services in SME Resilience first appeared on IT News Africa | Business Technology, Telecoms and Startup News.