The ongoing – and potentially worsening – load-shedding in South Africa is impacting a great deal more than IT running costs, it is also putting data and business continuity at risk. Moving strategically to the cloud can mitigate these risks.
This is according to Siphiwe Matore, Cloud Solution Architect at Huawei South Africa, who says powering on-premises data centres with generators can cost organisations hundreds of thousands – or even millions – of rands in diesel and operational staff. Equally concerning is the risk of costly business downtime and the loss of transactional data during power outages.
“Load-shedding has made it very clear that keeping business IT operations running is critical for continuity, and just a few hours of downtime can result in the loss of millions of rands. To experience this multiple times a day is something businesses just can’t recover from,” she says.
Matore says backup power is not the solution as it becomes apparent that load-shedding may drag on for years to come. “Relying on UPS devices, inverters and generators is like putting a plaster on the wound,” she says. Constantly switching between mains and backup power can result in service interruptions and damage IT hardware in the long run, she notes.
“But it is important to note that load-shedding is not the only reason to worry about a company's data protection and IT service availability. Eighty-six percent of South African businesses experienced some form of cyber security attacks in 2022 alone, and now we're the eighth most attacked country in the world,” Matore says. “Apart from malicious attacks, there are also other threats such as natural disasters like the storms we experienced in KwaZulu-Natal or hardware failures due to degradation or power surges, or even unintentional areas like staff deleting critical files and data. All these threats will be detrimental to businesses and continuing operations. So organisations really need to ask themselves what are they going to do in the event of a disaster?”
She says it has become imperative that organisations move to the cloud to ensure that backup and recovery services are easy to use, efficient, reliable and secure, to ensure uninterrupted and ongoing business continuity.
Matore notes that backup and disaster recovery (DR) are distinctly different. “Backup is about data protection, where a copy of your data is created to be used in the event of the original data being lost or unavailable. Traditionally, these data copies were written to tapes or removable drives and storage appliances. Now they are increasingly being stored in the cloud, which can be more economical and secure. On the other hand, DR is a set of measures to ensure the timely recovery of data, applications and systems to a separate physical site following a system failure, natural catastrophe or ransomware attack. So if your primary site were to be compromised, the business could seamlessly continue its IT operations from the cloud and mitigate the loss of business operations and money.”
She adds: “The use of a hybrid cloud is expected to increase by 31% in the next year in South Africa alone, with 53% of companies using backup as a service and 20% using DR as a service.” As predicted at the 2019 Cloud Conference and Expo.
Huawei Cloud with the support of its partners is helping customers migrate to the cloud to mitigate the new data loss and continuity risks they are facing.
Huawei Cloud Backup and Recovery (CBR) enables organisations to backup elastic cloud servers (ECSs), bare metal servers (BMSes), elastic volume service (EVS) disks, SFS turbo file systems, local files and directories, and on-premises VMware virtual environments with ease. In case of a virus attack, accidental deletion or software or hardware fault, organisations can restore data to any point in the past when the data was backed up. “CBR protects your services by ensuring the security and consistency of your data,” she says.
CBR supports crash-consistent backup for multiple disks on a server and application-consistent backup for database servers, ensuring data security and reliability. Incremental forever backups shorten the time required for backup by 95%. With Instant Restore, CBR supports recovery point objective (RPO) as low as one hour and recovery time objective (RTO) within minutes.
With three availability zones in South Africa, Huawei Cloud’s Storage Disaster Recovery Service (SDRS) provides cross-AZ disaster recovery (DR) protection for your servers, allowing you to achieve a recovery point objective (RPO) of zero through its high-speed network and continuous replication, while greatly reducing total cost of ownership (TCO). If a fault occurs in the source AZ, you can quickly restore services in the target AZ. Equipped with world-class infrastructure and solid power generation capacity, Huawei Cloud has not recorded a second of downtime since its arrival in South Africa three years ago. Huawei Cloud is invested heavily in R&D, capacity, redundancy and specialist technical support teams in the country, to help partners and customers keep systems running and avoid data loss.
https://it-online.co.za/2022/10/19/how-vendors-and-attackers-are-still-exploiting-fud/
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