Why It’s Time to Incorporate Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) for Your Business
Any service in the cloud is a benefit in some way to an organization. The most significant hurdle is finding the right integration solution to have current infrastructure seamlessly work with your cloud applications. DRaaS can take away much of the overhead, inadequate security, and storage space limitations and offer a faster, more robust solution for backups and disaster recovery plans. If you haven’t already moved disaster recovery options to the cloud, here is why it’s time to consider DRaaS.
Unlimited Storage
Every administrator experiences failed backups from storage limitations. DR backups take terabytes of storage space, and the only way to avoid failed backup attempts is to add more storage or delete old backups.
With cloud storage, you no longer need to worry about storage limitations, because in the cloud you just add more storage to your account. You no longer need to install hard drives or deal with failed backups. Your cloud host can expand storage capacity dynamically as you need it.
Cloud providers use data centers for computer resources. Data centers span across the globe and replicate data between each one. The cloud provider has drives deployed and waiting for use so that you can attach more storage to your account with a few clicks of the mouse in your account dashboard.
Better Security Than Your Own
Unless you have the budget to hire only the best and the brightest in cybersecurity, your network security isn’t as rock solid as a cloud provider’s on-site protection. You can even have the most expensive, best hardware on the market, but it does you no good if misconfigured.
Most cloud providers have certified staff for various regulatory standards such as HIPAA, PCI, ISO, and SOX. Before you sign a contract with a provider, ensure that they have certified security professional to handle your data. Without the right standards in place, you could be facing high fees.
You still need to consider security for your local network, but you can leave the high-level, complex security standards to the professionals in the cloud provider’s data centers. They will also help you configure the right security for synchronization between data centers and your local network.
Immediate Failover for Limited-to-No Downtime
For every minute that your servers, applications, and network equipment are down, you’re losing money. Estimate the cost of being completely down for a day, and that’s exactly how important it is to have efficient, robust failover in case of numerous disaster events including power outages, data leaks, floods, and fires.
Power outages are the leading cause of downtime. You could have expensive generators on-site, but you still need to gas them and move them into proximity to your equipment. If you have cloud services, your power goes out, and the system immediately fails over to the closest data center. Resources might be fewer and customers might see some performance degradation, but you won’t be completely unproductive.
The second most common event is accidental data deletion. With local backups, you need to find the latest backup and restore it. With cloud backups, the data is right at your fingertips and restoring information is as easy as “drag and drop” with a good disaster recovery plan.
For the most robust option, you synchronize data between the local network and the cloud data center. This option gives you up-to-the-minute updates, so the failover site runs in parallel with the local network until it’s needed. It’s an expensive option but the most effective.
Other options include sending backups to the cloud and making them easily retrievable in case of a failover. Any of these choices is better than allowing your business to stay entirely down for hours during a power outage or any other event.
Faster Data Recovery with Limited User Interaction
With standard disaster recovery, the first step is a phone call to someone who has the authority to put the plan into action. Then another call goes to the IT people who can start the process.
After the IT person is contacted, he needs to connect to the network and spend time recovering any lost data and working with various other employees until service is resumed.  The process of finding a person with authority and contacting the IT team to recover data can take over an hour. During this time, the business loses money.
With DRaaS, much of the wait time is eliminated using automation and notifications available in the cloud. For small outages, the cloud’s services can detect downtime and automatically fail over to an open resource. This type of automatic failover service eliminates any downtime, and your employees can be left to sleep the rest of the night.
For more extensive outages, DRaaS can reduce wait time by sending a notification to data center personnel who can then mitigate damages while IT teams respond to alerts. Even a half an hour can make a difference during disaster recovery, and the automation options available in the cloud are worth the fees each year when they can save you thousands in downtime damages.
Cost Efficient and Easy to Integrate
Leasing cloud equipment makes it much more cost efficient than buying an entire secondary failover system. Cloud providers also offer several different types of services so that you can have limited DR in the cloud for just backups and essential recovery or a fully staffed data center with a full mirror of your local network. The difference is the price and resources you have for disaster events.
IT administrators set in their ways are hard to convince, but once they move to the cloud, there is no question that options are far superior to local services. No organization should disregard disaster recovery, and they all should have some type of plan available. It takes months to create a plan, and it will need testing at least once a year. As the network changes, the plan changes and these additions to the network should be audited and included in your plan. DRaaS can be the difference between several days of downtime and only several minutes.
Contact us today to learn about Bleuwire™ services and solutions in how we can help your business.
