Whether caused by nature or human activity, IT disasters have one guaranteed outcome – a drop in productivity. This is why you need a disaster recovery plan that restores operations as quickly as possible. Harnessing the power and flexibility of the cloud, disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) makes enterprise-class protections available to businesses of any size.
Co-location for all
The best way to maintain operations during a disaster has always been through the use of co-located data centres. Under this design, businesses operate two data centres; their primary computing location and a duplicate data centre in a different physical location. Data is mirrored between the sites automatically so that if the primary data centre fails, traffic is automatically switched to the second, reducing downtime to a matter of seconds.
Effective and robust, co-located data centres are extremely expensive. Maintaining a duplicate means doubling your data centre costs ‘just in case’ there is an outage.
DRaaS offers a cost-effective alternative, using cloud infrastructure to host duplicate systems. Thanks to virtualised servers and tools like Veeam, there is no need to maintain physical hardware in a backup location. As with traditional co-location design, if the primary data centre goes offline, the cloud-based backup springs into action.
Using DRaaS, businesses can achieve ‘always on’ computing operations – and avoid costs like data centre rental, electricity and cooling and additional staff.
Pick and choose services
A good DRaaS service will offer much more than just a space to host virtual machines in the cloud. Reflecting the pay-as-you-use cloud model, businesses can select additional services that further improve their disaster recovery plans.
Options like a fully managed fail-over service will help to plug any skills or knowledge gaps for instance. Or tools and support to address regulatory and industry compliance requirements.
In this way, DRaaS allows businesses to build disaster recovery protections that perfectly match their requirements without the usual cost and inconvenience of a bespoke DR solution.
Don’t forget the essentials
Out of sight, out of mind? DR systems in the cloud are just as vulnerable as your on-premise servers. This means that you must ensure your DRaaS service provider is offering suitable security protection mechanisms. Things to look for include enterprise-grade security, antimalware, intrusion detection/prevention, and integrity monitoring. They should also provide comprehensive reporting so you can understand and document your security posture.
Go seamless
DRaaS should allow your mission-critical systems to fail over seamlessly. In doing so, your business is protected against local outages that damage productivity, availability, profitability and corporate reputation.
To learn more about WTL’s disaster recovery as a service offering and how it will help your business improve its disaster recovery response, please get in touch.