The success of any business depends on how quickly IT infrastructure can be restored after an incident occurs. disaster recovery service provides a mechanism to do that. Without it, a company risks extended downtime that impacts productivity, profits and customer service, as well as reputational damage. It can also lead to regulatory fines, lawsuits and lost business opportunities. Every organization must have a plan to address these incidents that are out of their control.
Disaster recovery plans must be tested regularly to ensure that they function as intended. However, testing can be expensive because it involves paying employees to spend time on manual tasks that require technical skill and management oversight. Additionally, a full disaster recovery solution includes replicating IT infrastructure in a remote location, which adds to the cost of the test.
For organizations that are looking for a more affordable solution to traditional disaster recovery, cloud-based Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) may be the answer. DRaaS solutions replicate data, applications and IT infrastructure in a third-party hosted environment, which removes the need to own and operate a secondary IT facility for this purpose.
There are three primary types of DRaaS: self-service, managed and hybrid models. Managed DRaaS solutions offer an all-inclusive solution that handles planning, testing and ongoing management of the DR process. Self-service DRaaS solutions provide the same functionality as managed DRaaS but are less expensive because they allow the IT team to handle the bulk of the planning and testing work. Hybrid DRaaS solutions combine features of both managed and self-service DRaaS with the ability to support a combination of physical, virtual and public cloud environments.
Managing and synchronizing company-wide data backups to support a zero-data-loss disaster recovery plan can be complex, costly and resource-intensive. However, a new generation of disaster recovery tools has emerged that automate processes and reduce costs to accelerate data recovery times. These include WAN-optimized replication that doesn’t impact production workloads and global data deduplication to save on storage and network costs.
In addition to accelerating recovery times, these DRaaS solutions also include automated failback processes that return production to the original primary site once the disaster has passed. This minimizes downtime and improves business continuity to ensure customers, employees and vendors can access critical systems as soon as possible after an outage.
Despite the best efforts of IT teams, some business disruptions are unavoidable. A well-planned and tested disaster recovery plan allows organizations to restore operations and protect their data from outages caused by natural disasters, cyber attacks and other events beyond an IT team’s control. Whether you’re an enterprise with thousands of employees or a small business that wants to safeguard your IT infrastructure and keep operations running smoothly, implementing a disaster recovery strategy is critical. Learn more about the benefits of disaster recovery and how to create a plan for your business. Alternatively, contact us to discuss your needs with one of our expert consultants.