Disaster Recovery Technology Has Moved On – Have You?
When was the last time you had to invoke your Disaster Recovery (DR)?
When was the last time you had to invoke your Disaster Recovery (DR)? Indeed, when was the last time you even tested your DR to be sure it would work should the worst happen and your offices or your primary IT environment suddenly become unavailable?
If like many firms you cannot answer either of these two questions easily, then you are exposing your organisation to unnecessary risk: One third of companies never fully recover data lost through an outage, and one in five companies suffer losses ranging from £30,000 to £3 million.
Put simply, without testing and verification, you have no idea as to whether you would be able to fully recover your IT systems in the event of a disaster or an extended outage.
You are not alone.
A 2014 survey conducted by the Disaster Recovery Preparedness (DRP) Council found that only one third of participating organisations tested their DR once or twice a year, while one in four conceded that they didn’t test their DR at all. Perhaps more worryingly, of the companies that did test their DR, more than half did not pass their own tests!
Necessary evil
Organising the necessary staff and equipment in order to perform DR tests can have a major impact on business as usual, as any IT professional will attest to. But too many organisations today approach DR as a necessary evil – a matter of compliance, or simply because it’s the right thing to do.
Others cite a lack of time and resources as key barriers, while many firms admit they find compliance reporting overly difficult. Only 15% of organisations surveyed by the DRP Council were able to produce reports on their DR activities automatically.
However, it’s the cost associated with the traditional DR model that has proved the single largest barrier to achieving a suitable level of DR preparedness amongst Small and Medium sized Businesses (SMBs). Investing in hardware at a second site to mirror their primary infrastructure has just not been viable.
But thanks to advances in cloud computing and virtualisation, DR can now be delivered as a service under the utility computing model. What’s more, leading Cloud providers such as The Bunker provide partial restore and automated testing and reporting capabilities to offer SMBs a compelling option that delivers a demonstrable ROI.
The Cloud’s killer app
DR as a Service (DRaaS) is the replication and hosting of physical or virtual servers by a third party to provide failover in the event of a disaster. It evolved out of Business
Continuity Planning (BCP) and DR preparedness, and is rapidly becoming the Cloud’s ‘killer app’ as it helps IT address many of its biggest challenges.
It is now possible to backup to and restore from the Cloud, backup to and restore to the cloud, and replicate to virtual machines (VMs) in the Cloud for rapid recovery and application awareness. All of this can be delivered via a dedicated, Ultra Secure, ultra available infrastructure for a fixed monthly fee under an annual contract:
- Better technology – single DR solution for virtual and physical systems
- Simple, reliable, and cost-effective way of protecting data on and off site
- Reduce cost substantially – pay a lower monthly fee, and only pay for invocation when it’s used
What’s more, The Bunker’s DRaaS includes advanced new features such as partial granular restore and automated reporting. This brings a new level of agility, efficiency and flexibility to your organisation that transforms DR into a valuable business asset. You can right size your DR provisioning, eliminate the cost of maintaining an off-site DR environment, and only pay for what you use in partial or full DR scenarios:
- Protect data, files, folders, emails, etc. with total confidence
- Restore rapidly back to your primary site after a DR event
- Granular restore flexing to full ‘bare metal’ DR capability as required
- Reduce the total impact cost of an outage or disaster
- Reduce your insurance premium with QSA auditable compliance and regular testing
Put your DR in the hands of the experts
As a trusted partner to more than 200 companies large and small, The Bunker provides mission-critical Cloud services, dedicated managed infrastructure and specialist teams. We’ve created an industry-leading DR as a Service offering that has huge flexibility to accommodate the idiosyncratic nature of current IT environments – whether physical, virtual, or a combination thereof – and can build a DR plan to meet your specific needs.
With The Bunker you get certainty – auditable compliance reporting, regular testing, and measureable ROI. We provide Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) to meet any business requirement, and guarantee that your business critical applications and data are available rapidly in the event of a partial or full disaster:
- All invocation requests acknowledged within 15 minutes
- An engineer will be working with you in under an hour
- Rapid restore (within minutes depending on SLA)
Technology has moved on. It’s time your business did too. Contact our expert team today to discuss your DRaaS requirements, and download our free DRaaS infopaper to read more.
