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Reasons to Consider Disaster Recovery as a Service for Your Business

Until recently, IT disaster recovery services have only been available to large enterprise businesses that could afford to sink big money into deploying matching hardware and software at geographically separate locations. And even then these DR solutions have been fraught with limitations and inconveniences. Like the difficulty of replicating the IT infrastructure between separate data centers. Or the near Herculean task required to conduct a real-world test of a disaster recovery plan.

Meanwhile, small and mid-size businesses priced out of this traditional disaster recovery option have been left to make do, focusing on backup and basic data recovery rather than replicating all business systems.

But that’s all changing.

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With the arrival of disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solutions that provide a platform for you to run your applications and complete IT infrastructure in the cloud, businesses of any size can deploy a disaster recovery plan that rivals the big guys in terms of performance and reliability. Without the huge upfront costs and resource commitments.

With this whitepaper, we’ll review 5 reasons why disaster recovery as a service may be right for your business, allowing you to more effectively, flexibly and cost efficiently achieve your business continuity goals.

Introduction

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With increasingly unpredictable weather patterns, even geographies once insulated from severe weather are susceptible to events that can bring down your system. So being able to gracefully fail over to another data center out of harm’s way is more important than ever. Whether you’re bracing for the next “Snowmageddon,” Hurricane Sandy or F3 tornado, you need to be ready.

Fortunately, cloud-based disaster recovery providers enable you to quickly and easily spin up a fully replicated environment in a separate geography. This is a stark contrast to traditional approaches that require a minimum of tens of thousands of dollars in capital expenditures, plus thousands more in ongoing monthly data center and connectivity costs

With DRaaS, you just need to download a small application to your physical hosts and conduct some network configuration to replicate your host environment; often accomplished in just a few hours by a DRaaS specialist.

Once deployed, if the host environment is compromised by a natural disaster it will failover to virtual machines running in the DRaaS provider’s cloud.

Because this is an exact replication of your data, applications and systems, your business can function as it normally does. When your local infrastructure is restored, a failback to your production instances is initiated.

Cloud availability locations are one of the most important factors when selecting a DRaaS vendor. Having the ability to replicate to one or more regions will make your disaster recovery plan more bullet proof and give you peace of mind. As part of that, you will want to designate cloud-based disaster recovery sites that are located in geographically stable areas, and away from disaster prone regions.

Your infrastructure is located in areas with severe weather risks

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Carrying out a disaster recovery plan has traditionally required substantial long term financial, infrastructure and resource commitments that have been within the reach of only the largest enterprises.

To do DR right, a company had to:

• Establish a physical backup site in a separate geography

• Continuously keep it synched to the primary data center

• Allocate resources to maintain it and oversee testing

Cloud-based disaster recovery levels the playing field by removing these obstacles, eliminating the need to invest in hardware, a second site or the IT expertise and team to run it.

Key to its appeal, a disaster recovery as a service solution utilizes pay-as- you-go pricing. So instead of being on the hook for large upfront capital investments with long term consequences, you simply pay predictable, bite-sized monthly fees.

Under normal conditions DRaaS users are charged only for long term storage. You pay to access virtual machines only when you need to conduct tests or replicate an entire IT system in response to an actual disaster.

By leasing rather than buying, you can also take advantage of attractive tax deductions that are a built-in benefit of the operating expense (OPEX) model. See page 6 for more details.

Perhaps best of all, paying substantially less money doesn’t get you less with DRaaS. In fact, most cloud-based disaster recovery providers can ensure you higher performance and reliability than traditional DR solutions at a fraction of the price.

You need a more affordable option

It is not uncommon for businesses to save 50% - 70% by using a disaster recovery as a service solution rather than build and manage their own hot site.

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By virtue of increased IT uptime, the right DRaaS solution can also provide you with a competitive advantage and a strategic ROI rather than merely be a required cost.

Most businesses experience 14 hours of downtime annually, equating to $300,000 per hour or almost $5 million a year.* Imagine how many more customers you could land or what new product ideas could be developed with that lost capital.

And consider the positive effect a disaster recovery as a service can have on qualitative measures that impact your bottom line.

1. Brand Equity

When IT disasters occur, the resulting news cycle can damage your hard earned brand equity. A good DRaaS provider can help you avoid that scenario by enabling you to meet even the most challenging Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs.)

2. Customer Trust

When your infrastructure and systems fail, you fail your customers. That leads to churn and higher customer acquisition costs. You can keep customer relationships strong by selecting a cloud-based DR solution with real-time replication that enables you to recover from disasters in just minutes.

3. Prospect Trust

If you disappoint your customers, everybody hears about it, including prospective new customers. Even a bad patch or update can create a ripple effect of bad publicity that sows fear, uncertainty and doubt among your prospects.

4. Employee Morale

By significantly increasing IT uptime, you can keep employees focused on delighting your customers rather than distracted and demoralized by downtime.

You are looking for strategic advantage

*Source: Ponemon Institute 

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The traditional CAPEX model of disaster recovery is fixed and unwieldy. You invest large sums of capital on hardware that mostly sits idle in data centers, called into service only when disaster strikes. Or you pay full production costs for cloud services.

Under the CAPEX model, when IT and business needs change, the physical infrastructure of the failover site needs to be updated too. All of which has a domino effect on your internal resources.

The complexities that come with trying to constantly mirror the primary and secondary sites also make testing your disaster recovery plan particularly grueling.

In contrast, cloud-based disaster recovery and its OPEX model is highly elastic and flexible; perfectly suited to businesses that need to be agile.

Need to scale capacity up or down? Not a problem. DRaaS solutions can handle demanding workloads.

Some even offer ad-hoc creation of additional replication targets.

Want to test your disaster recovery plan? Simple. At the click of a button, you can failover your entire infrastructure. So you can test your DR plan at any time, without affecting production replication.

Need to make adjustments to your contract? Easy. With most DRaaS plans, you can dial your resource needs up as needed.

And these are just a few examples of the flexibility that DRaaS provides you prior to a system failure. You’ll also see benefits from that flexibility should you experience an actual disaster.

Unlike traditional DR which often relies on the physical delivery of backup tapes that can take days to recover, DRaaS uses virtualization to more quickly and nimbly failover to a fully replicated environment in just seconds.

You need flexibility

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While most any data driven business can benefit from DRaaS, it can be particularly advantageous to companies that compete in regulated industries, like healthcare, insurance and finance.

Companies in regulated industries often have less latitude when it comes to how they prepare for and respond to events that cause downtime. If certain RPOs and RTOs are mandated, you simply have to meet them.

With traditional disaster recovery methods, adhering to these requirements can take it's toll on the bottom line, and typically requires a combination of expensive hardware and software solutions to achieve low RPO, hot site functionality. With DRaaS, however, meeting stringent limits on data loss and recovery times is easier, faster and much more affordable as newer technologies have enabled storage agnostic solutions for the modern virtualized datacenter.

With bandwidth prices plummeting, DRaaS providers can also offer realtime replication solutions to a wider range of businesses.

Security requirements are often more rigorous for regulated industries too, especially with regard to confidentiality.

A good example is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) which requires healthcare businesses to establish sophisticated processes that safeguard patient privacy.

Some of the more advanced DRaaS providers can actually exceed compliance requirements for HIPPPA, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and the Payment Card Industry (PCI), enabling you to mirror the most sensitive areas of your infrastructure, and provide indefinite and deep data archival services for your most vital systems.

You are in a regulated industry

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Click here to see how Assuritive’s purpose-built DRaaS can help your business.

Want to know more?

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Our sole focus is on DRaaS and your peace of mind.

Fast deployments; start to finish in a few hours.

Flexible pricing that reduces CAPEX and OPEX.

Technology exceeds HIPPA, SOX and PCI compliance requirements.

Testable replicated infrastructure to prevent system failures.

Tier 1 North American-based technical support.

1-877-820-6175www.assuritive.com