Business continuity is the key to customer loyalty. When companies experience downtime, employees can’t be productive and customers don’t receive the support they require. Mission-critical applications cease working. Customers and clients lose confidence in you.
Your organization faces many challenges to business continuity, such as cyberthreats, 
equipment failure, employee negligence, and natural disasters. During an outage or breach, the vital information your company needs to make decisions can be lost or compromised. The cost of losing data adds up. According to the Ponemon Institute’s 2015 Cost of Data Breach Study, a single lost file can cost a company an average of $154.
Without a solid and reliable backup and recovery strategy, your business risks losing access to the information and applications it needs to operate. Using cloud-based backup and recovery provides a reliable and cost-effective means of protecting your mission-critical data.
Limitations of Traditional Backup and Recovery
Duplicating, storing, and recovering data on-site or at a secondary site often proves risky, time-consuming, and expensive. When you experience a power outage, flood, or fire, on-site backup copies face the same risks as your originals. Tape backup is economical, but finding physical space to store the tapes can be difficult, and carting them around is labor intensive.
Backing up to a secondary location protects your data from being harmed when your primary data center takes a hit. However, creating a duplicate environment for backup and recovery requires that you budget for twice the storage hardware.
Companies that handle their own backup and recovery often don’t back up frequently enough. Daily or even weekly backups fail to capture incremental changes in data. Without backups that match the pace of changes in your data, your business can’t meet recovery point objectives (RPOs). Backup and recovery also needs to be tested often to ensure it will work in an emergency. Testing annually doesn’t cut it.
Many backup and recovery solutions only provide one or two features, so companies need to piece together a comprehensive strategy from disparate parts. This results in a solution that isn’t integrated and that denies your company visibility into how well your backup is performing.
Advantages of Cloud Backup and Recovery
The cloud makes backup and recovery as a service (BRaaS) possible. Instead of handling the backup and recovery process on-premises or at a secondary site, BRaaS uses a cloud infrastructure for data protection. Information can be backed up incrementally, ensuring access to real-time data. Speedy recovery enables your business to access important information immediately.
BRaaS provides a cost-efficient alternative to creating a secondary data center for off-site backup when attacks or outages disable the primary data center. Off-site backup is crucial now that ransomware attacks have evolved to the point where they delete any on-site backup files.
As with all cloud services, BRaaS requires no capital expenses for hardware. Instead, the storage resources and necessary software are available at a predictable monthly cost. When workloads increase, you can scale incrementally and effortlessly to meet the demands of storing more backup data. Data management tools, such as deduplication, make storing data more efficient.
Taking Backup and Recovery to the Cloud
As confidence in the cloud grows, more organizations are turning to it for data protection. According to CITO Research’s 2017 Executive Cloud Survey, 75% of C-suite executives see data protection and backup as the cloud initiative that will have the most impact on their business. Top executives look to the cloud as a way of recovering data quickly and reliably.
Companies in the Northeast looking for reliable cloud backup and recovery should turn to FirstLight. FirstLight offers redundant cloud infrastructure that ensures rapid RPOs and RTOs. Our customers benefit from 9,600 route miles of redundant fiber optic network. We offer BRaaS at an affordable, monthly subscription rate.
With BRaaS through FirstLight, you can rest assured that your business will stay up and running during this time of increasing risk.
Curious about the cost of downtime for your organization? Click on our downtime calculator to find out how it would impact you.
