Maintain business uptime with hosted disaster recovery

In days gone by, and still relevant for certain organisations today, businesses used to rely on a primary server infrastructure hosted on site at their offices or in a data centre with a secondary solution hosted at a different physical location. This gave them the disaster recovery resource they needed in the event of the primary solution suffering any downtime.

But not all businesses can afford the cost of a mirrored physical server environment and many businesses don’t even use traditional servers anymore. This is where cloud services known as disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) have come to the rescue to eliminate the average 14 hours of IT downtime experienced by businesses every year, resulting in 545 hours of lost employee productivity*.

With DRaaS, IT systems and data are replicated to a cloud infrastructure. If disaster strikes the primary site, the primary systems will fail over to the recovery service, and the business can continue to operate.

The benefits of DRaaS are as follows:

1. Cost-effectiveness
   Traditional DR systems often involve expensive hardware and an IT team to look after them. DRaaS offers the same DR capabilities at a contract or pay-as-you-go rate that is far below the cost of building and staffing a secondary solution. Businesses also need to consider the cost of downtime. Even a short outage can be expensive. DRaaS will ensure your business is quickly back up and running again.
    
2. Security
   DR solutions are just as vulnerable to cyber breaches as the rest of your IT infrastructure. A cloud-hosted solution will benefit from regular updates to protect your business from the latest threats
    
3. Scalability
   If you expand your business, you can easily grow your DRaaS solution too without the need to purchase extra equipment or take up more physical space in your comms room.
    
4. Flexibility
   You choose what you want to back up - servers, databases, operating systems etc. - and where you want them to be recovered to, as well as options to restore individual files or an entire system.

Here are some more details on how DRaaS works:

Replication
Data residing in a primary site is duplicated and sent to a disaster recovery service provider who hosts the environment remotely. It is important that replication includes both your virtual and physical servers, since most businesses have infrastructure that relies on both. When data is frequently added or altered, the DRaaS solution should allow regular data snapshots to avoid data loss during failover.

Failover
End-user access moves to a secondary site hosted by the disaster recovery service provider during a catastrophe. Speed is of the utmost importance, as any downtime can be detrimental to the business.

Failback
Data moves from the DRaaS provider’s environment back to the primary site. It is important to restart replication processes as soon as failback is complete to ensure continuous protection.

It is easy to see why DRaaS is becoming more popular with business that have not been able to afford traditional DR solutions. Please do not hesitate to contact us to discuss your disaster recovery needs to ensure your business does not suffer the cost if downtime.

* https://www.acronis.com/en-us/cyber-protection-center/posts/cyberattacks-smbs-face-existential-threat/