Three worst-case scenarios – How Cirrus DRaaS helps you avoid them

Backups simply aren’t enough anymore. These days, organizational resilience hinges on careful upstream planning of defence mechanisms, along with a disaster recovery plan.

Back on your feet

Disaster recovery (DR) solutions are emerging as a response to these threats. However, these solutions require secondary backup infrastructure, along with a team that can move quickly to recover data, restore working environments and resume normal operations.

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solutions allow you to avoid these expenses and are readily available for an affordable monthly fee.

DRaaS lets organizations build their data backups and replicate their IT infrastructure in a third-party cloud environment. It offers peace of mind, minus the costly investments in additional personnel and dedicated back-up infrastructure. These solutions make perfect sense in today’s business environment.

Let’s look at three scenarios that have the potential to wreak havoc on an organization, and discuss how DRaaS can help get everything running normally again in record time.

Scenario 1: Destructive cyberattack on a hospital

Unfortunately, this is an increasingly common scenario: a hospital unexpectedly suffers a major ransomware cyberattack. Patient management systems are paralyzed, medical data is suddenly encrypted, and regular services are severely disrupted.

It’s an extremely risky situation. Without an adequate backup plan, the hospital could be at a standstill for weeks or even months, compromising patient care. Hospital staff wouldn’t be able to access critical information, patients’ lives would be at risk, and recovering data and restoring the systems could take weeks. It would take even longer to rebuild the trust of patients and their families, not to mention the potential costs of legal action.

But fortunately, the IT managers at this hospital had opted for Cirrus DRaaS. As soon as they detected the attack, they immediately activated their disaster recovery plan. It took only minutes to switch to a healthy replication, bypassing the malicious encryption. All patient records, management systems and critical applications were restored almost instantaneously, maintaining continuity of care.

DRaaS significantly reduced the impact of the cyberattack. There was no ransom to pay, and they managed to avoid the worst.

Scenario 2: Sabotage upon termination of employment

A member of the IT department of a major insurer abruptly leaves his employer on bad terms. In retaliation, he uses his access to lock down access to crucial client files and business-critical IT systems.

The company suddenly finds itself at an impasse. They have no way to deal with calls from clients or handle new or ongoing claims. Productivity plummets, ramping up frustration and anxiety among staff and clients. The result is more than just lost revenue. It can cause irreparable damage to the insurer’s reputation.

When sabotage is detected, IT managers can activate their disaster recovery plan with Cirrus DRaaS. Its granular control means they can focus only on affected systems without impacting overall operations. Working with data replicated in the cloud, they can quickly restore working environments and retrieve access to client files.

Cirrus DRaaS instantly switches the IT team to a recovery environment, so the company can get back to work quickly and seamlessly.

Scenario 3: Global attack affects local bank

It’s becoming more and more common: a Canadian financial institution caught up in the chaos of a global cyberattack. The attack comes from overseas and targets the institution’s US cloud service provider. This time, it’s in the form of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

The cloud service provider’s data centres are overwhelmed by malicious traffic, which disables access to core services stored in the cloud. As a result, some transactions are rendered impossible, both online and in-branch. In this emergency situation, the bank may have to suddenly suspend some of its normal operations—unless a contingency plan supported by Cirrus DRaaS is already in place to limit any damage caused by the DDoS attack.

By continuously replicating the bank’s critical data in a secure cloud, Cirrus DRaaS keeps vital information available even if the provider’s cloud services are interrupted. IT staff can instantly switch to this recovery environment, bypassing any data centres impacted by the DDoS attack. Then, they can quickly restore data access and essential operations can resume.

Cirrus DRaaS offers financial institutions enhanced operations resilience. It minimizes financial losses while safeguarding the institution’s reputation from a potentially damaging DDoS attack, whether it targeted the institution or not.

Start planning ahead

The Cirrus DRaaS solution used successfully in these scenarios is based on Zerto advanced technologies and hosted in Canada’s largest sovereign cloud. It offers continuous data replication, frequent restore points and near-instantaneous recovery.

With Cirrus DRaaS, public and private sector organizations can quickly switch to backup systems to protect sensitive information and continue mission-critical services. With this kind of reliability, you will build trust with clients and partners and reduce the financial and legal risks of prolonged downtime and catastrophic data loss. It’s this solid foundation that will enable you to keep moving forward and accelerate the adoption of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.

Don’t wait for a disaster. Start preparing your organization now. Learn more about Cirrus DRaaS.