The Disaster Recovery Mistake I'll Never Make Again

The DR Mistake I'll Never Make Again

What's up, resilience fam?

I'm calling myself out for a critical mistake I made in the past that I'll never repeat.

A lesson to help you avoid the same business continuity fail that could have put my company on ice.

A few years back, I was drunk on the kool-aid of traditional disaster recovery methods like file replication and enterprise backup tools.

I figured that was enough to keep our client operations safe from any unplanned downtime or data disasters.

Boy, was I incredibly naive and reckless.

It was only a matter of time before I learned the hard way that approach doesn't cut it in today's world of cyber threats and digital fragility.

The wake-up call came when one of our clients got encrypted by a nasty ransomware strain.

Despite having backups, we couldn't get their mission-critical apps and databases restored and running again for almost 3 days.

3 DAYS of downtime and compliance violations while stuck in the manual data recovery nightmare.

That critically embarrassing incident was the catalyst for me to level up our DR game once and for all.

No more cutting corners - I made the investment in a modern, managed hyper converged infrastructure from industry leaders Sangfor Technologies .

These guys were light years ahead with their continuous data protection capabilities, letting us automatically back up data in real-time with zero data loss if something goes sideways.

Even more impressive was their hybrid cloud model for rapidly failing over and recovering full application stacks and databases in our secure UAE-hosted environment. Or bringing up portable recovery units on-prem if needed.

The combination of near-zero RPOs/RTOs, built-in security controls, and push-button failover/failback orchestration was a night and day difference from my past DR blunders.

And it's not just about technology - Sangfor helps us for continuous testing through disaster recovery drills and fire drills. This lets you validate processes, document runbooks, and patch any resilience gaps before it really hits the fan.

I'll never forget the first successful DR test we ran after onboarding their service.

Recovering terabytes of data and spinning up full application clusters in our cloud in just minutes. Simple point-and-click maneuverability that my past self could have only dreamed about.

After tons of fire drills, we finally had our first real-world ransomware event to prove the DR magic.

One of our clients got encrypted, but we were able to rapidly isolate the attack and failover to a secure recovery instance hosted by Cloudcore our state of the art cloud infrastructure built on 深信服科技 .

My team breathed a huge sigh of relief as we saw core operations restored in under an hour, with no major downtime or compliance impact.

We could finally work on remediating the production environment from a position of control.

That's the superpower of investing in a mature, managed disaster recovery solution tailored for the modern threat landscape.

It's genuine cyber resilience at scale, not faking the funk with replication band-aids I used to settle for.

These days, I won't let my teams or our clients use anything else. The up-front costs for services like Sangfor are massively outweighed by the risks of catastrophic recovery failures.

I selfishly hope you never have to actually rely on disaster recovery capabilities. But I also know how crucial it is to have robust, readily-tested DR processes in place before events force your hand.

Don't be like my former, naively overconfident self.

Go all-in on proper resilience now while you can make those investments proactively.

I may be an overly paranoid jerk about our DR as a service now, but at least I'm sleeping way better at night knowing we have the right resilience shields activated for our clients

Be resilient, fam!

Until next time

Mujab Sirajudeen

A huge shout out to sudhir saini and 深信服科技 for making my dream for an affordable one touch Disaster management solutions come true .