Disaster Recovery for Higher Education is a Must. Here's Why.

Disaster recovery should be an integral piece of any higher education institution’s overall IT infrastructure. With disaster recovery, higher education institutions can protect vulnerable student, faculty, and research data while continuing to grow student enrollment, improve the student experience, and enhance student outcomes. A modern, cloud-based disaster recovery solution can help an institution provide uninterrupted mission-critical online learning services. Establishing Disaster Recovery on Oracle Cloud is also a strong line of defense in preventing data loss in the face of ever-growing malicious attacks such as malware and ransomware, which,according to the FBI, has a disproportionately high impact on higher education.

Despite the clear need to have disaster recovery solutions in place, many universities and colleges face challenges when it comes to implementing traditional disaster recovery solutions.

The Challenges of Traditional Disaster Recovery Solutions

It Can Be Prohibitively Expensive

Many institutions simply do not have the financial resources needed to keep servers around for the sole purpose of disaster recovery. Both upfront and ongoing costs are high, and the cost of building a new facility to house their data centers can make traditional disaster recovery solutions nearly impossible to invest in. Higher Ed is being forced to choose between cutting budgets orraising tuition to unsustainable levels, further discouraging them from investing in traditional disaster recovery solutions.

Maintaining Traditional Disaster Recovery Solutions Can Be Difficult

As infrastructures begin aging, institutions are unable to keep up with the costs of updating their IT infrastructure. Ohio State University, for example, found themselves in a difficult situation when the time came to update the building that housed their data center. After speaking to an outside consultant, they found that they had about $4 million in deferred maintenance, highlighting the exorbitant costs of maintenance alone for these higher education institutions. Another hurdle that higher education institutions face comes in the form of budget cuts, making it even more difficult for institutions to justify spending money on maintaining traditional disaster recovery solutions.

Incompatible Infrastructure

Universities and colleges use different types of software and hardware for record maintenance, HR and payroll, proprietary research, and distance learning needs. As a result, their overall IT infrastructure becomes more complex, making it increasingly difficult to maintain an effective disaster recovery plan. To keep up with this pace of expansion, larger institutions may partner between campuses to back up each other’s data resources, but this adds another layer of complexity to their disaster recovery solution. Should a disaster strike, campuses must coordinate with each other to recover their data, hindering their ability to provide uninterrupted service in the face of disaster.

What Can Institutions Do?

Despite these challenges, Higher Ed institutions cannot go without a disaster recovery solution. Protecting the data of students, faculty, and staff is a priority, and the penalties for not doing so can be extremely high. Instead of struggling to implement traditional disaster recovery solutions, institutions can turn to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for their disaster recovery solution needs instead.

Disaster Recovery on Oracle Cloud is Simplified

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) solves the cost and time problems by providing automation tools to quickly deploy and easily maintain disaster recovery solutions in the cloud. For mission-critical Oracle database workloads, OCI database cloud services include a cloud-native data guard. This feature allows institutions to create standby instances and keep that in sync with their primary counterparts in a fully automated manner. For application workloads, OCI offers cloud-native and ISV solutions, like Rackware’s disaster recovery platform service, which fully automate deployment, maintenance, and testing of disaster recovery solutions.

Disaster Recovery on Oracle Cloud is Cost-Effective

Rather than creating costly mirrored images of production servers in traditional on-premise disaster recovery solutions, OCI allows you to start with a fractional footprint that consumes minimum cloud services and capacity. This automatically scales up to full production capacity. This processing reduces the overall cost of disaster recovery by up to 70%.

Furthermore, much of the disaster recovery on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure can be automated. This eliminates human cost, error, and risk, further making management for institutions and maintenance easier when compared to traditional disaster recovery solutions.

Disaster Recovery on Oracle Cloud is Robust and Reliable

Each Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region is geographically separated by vast distances, minimizing the risk of nationwide natural disasters that could cause damage and halt operations. This is something that even larger campuses would have trouble maintaining if their facilities are struck by a natural disaster. Past occurrences of campus-wide natural disasters have revealed the importance of keeping your data centers in geographically disparate locations, as the OCI does.

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides multiple RPO (Recovery Point Object) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) options, allowing campuses to have greater control over availability vs. costs. The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure makes these costs transparent and predictable, offering facilities with limited budgets the financial room to implement a disaster recovery solution.

Disaster Recovery on Oracle Cloud is Not Optional

In Higher Ed, disaster recovery cannot be treated as optional. Having a disaster recovery solution in place will help institutions protect valuable data, modernize their practices, ensure compliance, and allow them to continue to provide uninterrupted service to students and faculty in the face of disaster.

However, most higher ed institutions cannot afford the costs that come with traditional disaster recovery solutions. They can be prohibitively expensive, difficult to maintain, and the IT infrastructure used across the institution can be incompatible with one another, making it difficult to effectively implement a disaster recovery solution.

In the face of these challenges, disaster recovery via Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is the solution. It allows institutions to have greater control over availability versus cost. Disaster recovery via OCI is simplified and does not force an institution to forgo legacy systems entirely. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is also easier to manage and maintain and allows institutions to have a solution in place should they be struck by an unforeseeable disaster.

Each institution is unique when it comes to what’s needed in a disaster recovery solution. At Astute Business Solutions, we'll help you create a business continuity plan that not only safeguards your data from disasters, ransomware, and malware attacks; we'll also show you how you can save time and money with disaster recovery on OCI. Schedule an assessment to get started.