What is a Disaster Recovery Plan Template?

Disaster recovery is a subcomponent of a business continuity plan. It focuses on restoring core operations while minimizing or avoiding downtime caused by a disaster event. In today’s data-centric business environment, the IT portion of a disaster recovery plan is typically the heart of a modern business continuity plan. It’s intended to ensure core operations remain online when a disaster event — such as a ransomware attack, natural disaster, or prolonged power outage — threatens the interruption of business continuity.

Many organizations use a disaster recovery plan template to ensure they account for every last element when creating their plan. This document covers aspects that can range from keeping power on to secondary lines of communication and ensuring IT systems remain operational.

Below, we’ll look at perhaps the most important part of a disaster recovery plan template for organizations that have migrated their data and workloads to the cloud:cloud backup.

How Cloud Backup Fits into a Disaster Recovery Plan Template

The IT portion of a disaster recovery plan is primarily focused on recovering and restoring the mission-critical data and workloads needed to ensure business continuity. For example, if your business has experienced a ransomware attack and lost access to its primary data, the disaster recovery plan outlines the steps needed to restore that data so core operations can continue.

If your organization has migrated to the cloud, a cloud backup solution is the ideal method to facilitate a restore since it can leverage the scale and elasticity of the cloud. The cloud backup solution allows you to automatically back up data on a customized schedule and then store the data. Should data recovery be required, the solution can restore the data from the most recent backup.

It’s crucial to note that data can only be recovered and restored if there’s a valid backup copy to restore from, making the security of the backup data paramount. If your backup data copy is unsecured and exposed, you are risking your ability to recover the data. Plus, since business continuity is time-sensitive, the disaster recovery plan should be able to restore the most important data and workloads first so your most essential operations and processes can continue unhindered while a full restore completes.

Therefore, an effective disaster recovery plan template for a cloud-native organization should include:

• A viable cloud backup solution
• A way to ensure the security of the backups
• A way to identify and prioritize the mission-critical data needed to ensure business continuity

However, not all cloud backup solutions are capable of checking all these boxes. The cloud backup tool you choose will directly affect your organization’s disaster recovery abilities.

Achieve Secure Cloud Backup and Rapid Disaster Recovery with Clumio

Clumio’s secure cloud backup platform optimizes disaster recovery with features designed to streamline data restoration—enabling an organization to meet or exceed its recovery time objective (RTO) during a disaster event.

Clumio safeguards backup copies by storing them in an encrypted, air-gapped backup solutionoutside of the primary account — meaning if your primary data is accessed or compromised, the backup remains safe. When data restoration is needed, Clumio’s granular and flexible recovery capabilities can quickly identify and rapidly restore the specific mission-critical data and applications needed to maintain business continuity while a full recovery completes.

Cloud backup is the key to a successful disaster recovery plan template. Learn why Clumio is the industry’s leading innovator for cloud backup and rapid disaster recovery by scheduling a demo today.

A Few Examples of the Mandela Effect:

• Although most people remember childhood character Curious George as being drawn with a tail, he does not have one.
• Many people believe there is a brand of peanut butter called “Jiffy” but there is not. There’s Jif, and there’s Skippy, but no Jiffy.
• In the iconic scene in “Silence of the Lambs,” Hannibal Lecter does not say “Hello Clarice” as many people remember.  He says “good morning.”

The Mandela Effect in the Cloud

The Mandela effect is not just a pop culture phenomenon, it exists in the world of enterprise technology, too. It’s a common misconception that data stored in the cloud is automatically backed up.  The truth is that cloud providers operate on a shared responsibility model, in which the cloud provider is responsible for the security of the software, hardware and infrastructure, but not customers’ data.

For example, when AWS refers to their highly durable Amazon S3 service, it’s true that the platform is incredibly durable, which means you’re unlikely to experience any trouble with their systems or infrastructure.  However, this has nothing to do with protecting your data from accidental deletions, ransomware attacks or insider threats. According to the shared responsibility model, that’s your job.

Taking Steps to Protect Your Cloud Data

Customers love working with Clumio because they get air-gapped, immutable data protection with incredibly fast time to value while SaaS simplicity ensures fast and simple ingest, cataloging, search and recovery at any scale. Clumio allows customers to automate protection of their AWS and Microsoft 365 data, saving time and resources that allow them to focus on strategic initiatives and reducing TCO compared with other options.

Don’t let data protection misconceptions leave you vulnerable.

The Grass is Actually Greener in the Cloud

Until very recently, many enterprises were limited by on-prem infrastructure, requiring huge data centers that had to be maintained, cooled, and secured. On top of that, the enterprise-owned server utilization rate is a measly 18%, with the majority of data centers operating at energy efficiency levels below 80%. This underutilization made on-prem ripe for disruption when the cloud came about. The cloud’s on-demand scalability provided companies the ability to optimize utilization rates without the hassle of managing, powering or cooling infrastructure. Considering the benefits, it’s not surprising that the average enterprise on-prem to cloud migration led to a 65% energy reduction and 84% carbon reduction (Accenture, The Green Behind the Cloud). Moreover, AWS is set to power all operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025, with a commitment to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. They use reclaimed or recycled water for cooling and have embodied carbon in the construction of newer data centers across the globe. And as an AWS recommended partner, Clumio is pushing the boundaries of environmentally sustainable computing with its on-demand hyper-scalable architecture.

Cloud-Native Solutions are Key to Maximize Sustainability

whether you need help protecticting your data against ransomware, meeting compliance requirements, or recovering from data loss; data backups can take up a significant amount of storage space, and increase your infrastructure footprint if done on-prem. Companies must choose carefully if they are conscious of reducing their carbon footprint from their data. Some best practices include going with a cloud-native / SaaS data protection vendor if possible, implementing incremental backups vs full system snapshots, categorizing and auto-archiving data based on criticality and usage, and most importantly, investing in a platform that is architected to scale on demand. If these concerns sound like yours, Clumio can help.

How Clumio Can Help

Clumio is a cloud-native backup solution, architected with a container-based stateless data processing pipeline that leverages efficient Lambda functions. This allows adaptability and efficient scaling to optimize usage based on your exact policies. Having this scalable compute and increased utilization rates can ultimately lead to significant carbon reduction from your data estate, in addition to significantly lower TCO (save your wallet while saving the planet).

See for yourself how the industry’s first cloud-native backup and rapid recovery solution can optimize your business’s sustainability metrics. Schedule a demo and learn how your business can be up and running with Clumio in as few as 10 minutes — no need to wait for and install new infrastructure and software.

Examples of hidden and fluctuating cloud backup costs

Egress Fees

The majority of cloud providers will allow their users to place data into the cloud without any fees. However, this does not apply when their data is retrieved from the cloud. Cloud providers typically charge what’s known as egress fees any time data is retrieved.

If your enterprise is constantly pulling its data out of the cloud—such as migrating or recovering data— you can see how the fees can add up quickly and lead to inflated costs that are nearly impossible to predict. Egress fees are considered a hidden fee since they fluctuate based on usage and are tied to a common action (data retrieval).

Licenses

There may be a variety of licenses that are required, each with their own fee. These can snowball when cloud backup vendors require licenses for each of the data sources you back up or multiple licenses per user—something you may not realize until the bill comes.

Snapshots and Storage Costs

It is common for enterprises to create long-term storage for their production data if they need to recover it after an attack—such as ransomware. This could involve creating massive amounts of snapshots for each account in high-tier storage. Furthermore, each time a block or file is changed, a new snapshot is automatically created. These snapshots are replicated across accounts, effectively doubling backup storage costs that continue to pile up over time. Costs are further compounded when considering industry retention requirements that go beyond 35 days.

Adding to all the complexity is the fact that it’s difficult to gauge just how many of the backup snapshots in your AWS accounts are even needed. Sure, your bill can display how much you are spending in a particular region, but it doesn’t show the level of granularity regarding the age of the snapshots or assets they are associated with.

Achieve Predictable Costs and Lower TCO with the Industry’s Leading Cloud-Native Backup Solution

You can avoid excessive cloud spending and gain control over backup costs by choosing a cloud backup solution with a simple, straightforward pricing model that clearly spells out the ongoing charges.

Built natively in AWS, Clumio’s backup solution offers the scalability, performance, data protection, and faster access to innovation made possible by the cloud while avoiding the hidden costs, complexity, and limited flexibility of snapshot-based backup solutions.

Simplified Pricing

Clumio’s Pay-As-You-Go consumption model with rollover credits provides enterprises with a simplified and clear backup-as-a-service solution that ensures cost predictability while lowering TCO:

• Transparency – No hidden costs, no license fees, and no egress charges—plus full visibility into data consumption.
• No Friction – Choose from on-demand or commitment contracts with no setup required.
• 100% SaaS – No complex cloud infrastructure or software to install or manage.
• An integrated cost analyzer tool that provides insights to help reduce unnecessary cloud spend

Reduced Storage Spending

Rather than retain Amazon EBS snapshots, Clumio further reduces spending by storing data in a compressed, de-duplicated format in Amazon S3, effectively cutting the cost of long-term EBS data retention. This allows enterprises to meet compliance and develop retention strategies based on business and regulatory requirements instead of costs.

Get Started with Clumio

Clumio offers more than just cost savings. In under 15 minutes, your enterprise can:

• Instantly backup AWS data across your entire organization with Clumio
• Gain data protection from ransomware attacks and other malicious threats via air-gapped storage with Clumio
• Meet varying and complex data compliance objectives with global policies with Clumio
• Lower RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and ensure business continuity in the event of downtime with Clumio

Experience firsthand why Clumio is the industry’s leading innovator for AWS cloud backup. Start your free trial, all without any pre-planning or the need to install new infrastructure or software.

Ron Miller recently wrote an article on TechCrunch titled “It Really Does Take a Village to Keep you Secure in the Cloud” that struck a chord with me.  In his article, Ron discussed the cloud shared responsibility model and the importance of us all taking steps to ensure the security and persistence of our data. I appreciate his view of the cloud computing community as a village and the opportunity to consider everyone’s part in it. How can we help each other? How can we make this village better?

Thinking about the cloud computing community as a village; an interdependent network of individuals within a given space.  Individual members have their own specializations but many have overlapping needs for which it may not be feasible to be self-sufficient. You might have a farmer, a blacksmith and a shoemaker.  The farmer doesn’t make his own tools and shoes, because it would cause him to neglect the farm. Instead he gets them from the blacksmith and the shoemaker.  As members of the cloud computing village, we also want to focus on our specializations, making them the best they can be, and relying on other members of the village for the other things we need.

Ron paraphrases AWS Chief Security Officer Steve Schmidt saying “AWS is a target. It has to deal with millions of events every month, most of which we (cloud consumers) never hear about.”  With AWS’s security team monitoring their services and Security Guardians embedded in each service development team, it’s safe to say that AWS is doing their part. But as Steve Schmidt states, AWS data is targeted by bad actors. So what about the rest of us in the shared responsibility model? What is our responsibility and what do we need from each other? As Ron states, “Security is such a complex undertaking that no one entity can be responsible for keeping a system safe, especially when user error at any level can leave a system vulnerable to clever hackers. There have to be communication channels across every level of the organization, with customers and with concerned third parties.”

Preventative security measures are an important part of everyone’s responsibility, and there are other village members who can help with that part of your security stance.  But experts agree that when it comes to data breaches, ransomware and insider threats, it’s not a matter of if, but when. This makes it imperative to back up your data outside your account and control access domain.  Clumio provides an important part of keeping the village safe by offering its members turnkey, air gapped, immutable data protection. We use the power of the cloud to power incredible scale and speed within a secure, simple, intuitive backup and recovery solution that frees up your time for creating your own innovations. We know how important security is, so we’ve built in security features like SSO, MFA, end-to-end encryption with BYOK, access controls and more.