Tag Archives: Disaster Recovery

3 reasons why your business should adopt DRaaS

March 21, 2016 jane robertson

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solutions make essential safeguarding of applications and data both more accessible and effective for small and large businesses alike.

Whether it be a natural disaster, human error, cyber-attack or hardware failure, an interruption to IT services can be catastrophic for businesses. To deal with the challenges associated with storing and potentially recovering large volumes of mission-critical data, organisations have a compelling option in DRaaS.

DRaaS is a cloud-based solution that provides near instant replication of your servers. In the case of downtime, whether scheduled or unscheduled, DRaaS enables you to failover to a copy of your infrastructure and failback to your original infrastructure when it’s ready, maintaining business continuity.

Whilst high-budget enterprises have typically had Disaster Recovery (DR) infrastructures in place for some time, the emergence of DRaaS yields several advantages that make the same capabilities possible for all businesses.

1. Disaster Recovery as a Service Reduces Costs

It’s simply not viable for many businesses to purchase, configure and manage a secondary site to failover to in case of disruption. It requires a huge upfront expenditure on hardware, plus unpredictable data centre operating costs.

DRaaS solutions are much more affordable. There are no upfront costs, but simply a monthly, manageable bill for leasing resources. Ongoing costs, such as those for electricity usage and maintenance, are the responsibility of the vendor.

You also only pay for what you use – a benefit that typifies the cloud – and there’s no need for overprovisioning, as would be required with a traditional DR infrastructure.

2. DRaaS Provides Access to Enterprise-Grade Protection

New technologies are revolutionising DR, and the speed and efficiency that can be achieved in data protection. For instance, advancements in virtualisation software have made Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) of just minutes and seconds affordable.

For organisations that choose to operate their own DR infrastructures, adopting new, advanced DR software poses both logistical and financial challenges.

Leading DRaaS solutions will include the latest software as standard, enabling the same simplified data replication, rapid RTOs and RPOs and comprehensive data protection that enterprises have access to.

3. DRaaS Refocuses Your Business Strategy

DR can be a burden that bogs down your IT department. It can involve extensively managing a secondary site, performing regular, intricate failover tests and reviewing recovery capabilities to meet compliance requirements. This distracts IT from core strategy and responsibilities that develop your business.

More than the sum of its parts

DRaaS solutions provide access to new technologies, technologies that can automatically test and invoke your DR infrastructure, enabling your internal team to focus and prioritise tasks that are central to your long-term business strategy. As data security becomes an increasingly important responsibility for organisations of all sizes, DRaaS offers affordable, yet complete protection.

A DRaaS solution, as an alternative to configuring and managing your own DR infrastructure, is a formidable option for any business looking to exploit the efficiencies and innovation of the cloud.

To find out more about DRaaS from BTL click here or download our data sheet

Why Do Businesses Fail to Adopt Disaster Recovery as a Service?

March 8, 2016 Rob Mackle

With a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution, small and large businesses alike can access comprehensive protection against downtime of mission-critical applications, which was previously only achievable for enterprises with significant IT budgets.

However, many organisations still overlook DRaaS solutions based on perceptions that are not necessarily accurate.

In this blog post we look at four common reasons why businesses opt against investing in DRaaS solutions.

‘We can’t afford Disaster Recovery’

Full Disaster Recovery (DR) is traditionally seen as a luxury reserved for big-budget enterprises. After all, configuring a secondary site for rapid failover involves considerable hardware and data centre investment.

By outsourcing your DR to a vendor with a cloud-based DRaaS solution, you eliminate these upfront investments and the need to overprovision. Advancements in cloud-based technologies enable DRaaS customers to run virtual infrastructures on any hardware, so there’s no need to maintain and replace specific hardware.

This makes comprehensive DR for all of your applications achievable with a limited budget.

‘We can’t afford rapid RPOs and RTOs’

Traditionally you needed deep pockets to achieve business continuity with DR solutions. Rapid Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) – i.e. the maximum period where data may be lost and the target time for the resumption of services – required extremely frequent snapshot replication of your applications and an always-on hot site with the required supporting infrastructure.

DRaaS vendors have adopted emerging, cost-effective virtualisation technologies that minimise RPOs and RTOs to just seconds and minutes. For instance, new DR software uses asynchronous replication at the hypervisor level, resulting in quicker, cheaper and more flexible failover.

Furthermore, DRaaS enables you to rely on the infrastructure of a vendor to gain rapid restore times. This will typically consist of a high-speed, fibre network connecting its data centres and stringent SLAs.

‘We don’t have the resources to manage Disaster Recovery’

Some organisations have a dedicated team to manage DR, but obviously this is out of the question for many.

A major advantage of DRaaS is that it outsources the replication, failover and failback processes, so you don’t need specialist resources and expertise. Some vendors have automated one-click systems to easily test and invoke an entire DR infrastructure, and then failback to the original infrastructure. This makes business continuity achievable with minimal human intervention.

‘We do not prioritise Disaster Recovery’

Planning for something that has not happened before or is seen as highly unlikely may prevent you from prioritising DR above other business processes and activities. However, the potential damage that downtime can cause to your businesses finances and reputation is so great that DR must be a top priority.

This is reflected by research that found that 70% of organisations that suffer from a severe IT disaster go out of business within a year.

By utilising a DRaaS solution, you can fully safeguard your organisation from lengthy data loss and lost revenue from downtime, without taking your IT department’s focus and budget away from other responsibilities.

It’s vital to examine your DR plan and processes, and consider the range of options that are available to your business. DRaaS is an attractive, yet often misunderstood option that offers exceptional efficiency and reliability in preventing costly downtime.

ClouDRaaS from BTL offers reliable and rapid response Disaster Recovery in the cloud.

To find out more click here or download our data sheet.

Backup Technology launches ClouDRaaS, a one click Disaster Recovery Service

March 7, 2016 jane robertson

Backup Technology today launches ClouDRaaS, a new ‘one click’ Cloud Disaster Recovery service offering cost-effective, automated DR.

ClouDRaaS from BTL is a disaster recovery service that solves the problem of production-ready DR with one simple click of the mouse. It is based on hypervisor-based replication software from Zerto which does away with snapshots and delivers DR that never impacts performance, with RPOs of seconds and RTOs of minutes.

One of the largest providers of further education in London is already using ClouDRaaS from BTL. Havering Sixth Form College, which has approximately 2400 full-time students, says it has resulted in an improved approach to DR.

Graham Francis, Director of Continuous Improvement at Havering Sixth Form College, explains: “It’s given us an enterprise class DR solution for our production infrastructure with a predictable pricing structure. We didn’t have to upgrade our network, storage or servers and we are seeing RPOs of seconds, with significantly reduced RTOs achieved during the regular testing. ClouDRaaS fits seamlessly into our existing infrastructure and is delivering extremely high service levels.”

ClouDRaaS from BTL offers the following benefits:

Quick and remote deployment – DR within days
One click recovery and rollback of applications
Granular application protection
Certified annual managed invocation testing for compliance
Reliable invocation and testing methodology
Range of options for invocation and connectivity
Replication of any environment regardless of storage vendor or architecture
Simple pricing model
Eliminates the impact of disasters

Matthew Parker, Managing Director, Backup Technology, said: “ClouDRaaS offers that first, safe, step into the cloud by giving you the opportunity to safely evaluate and test the water without having to give up control over production applications in the data centres you are using. It makes effective Disaster Recovery possible within the private cloud, to the public cloud and in the public cloud and because it’s based on virtual replication and is storage and hypervisor agnostic, there’s no need to worry about availability, performance or scalability.”

Sean Casey, Director, Zerto, said: “The global cloud services market is quickly evolving and expanding to include new offerings such as Disaster Recovery as a Service. Cloud service providers have a unique opportunity to help customers overcome inflexible IT infrastructures that are not compatible with disparate technologies because of vendor lock-in. Zerto Virtual Replication is purpose-built to work with any virtualized IT and cloud environment to make it fast and easy to achieve optimal levels of production workload mobility, which is enabling our partners to increase their revenue growth and improve service levels.”

BTL is part of UK cloud hosting solutions company iomart and offers backup and Disaster Recovery from a network of Tier 1 data centres, with industry-leading SLAs and the widest range of ISO accreditations. iomart’s cloud and backup solutions are certified for connection to public sector organisations via PSN and N3.

For more information read the BTL ClouDRaaS datasheet.

To speak to us call 0800 999 3600, email sales@backup-technology.co.uk or Tweet us @backuptech

The Importance of Support Levels in Partnership

November 30, 2015 Callum Huddlestone

Lack of support in any project can easily result in failure even with simplest project or activity. It is important for you to know that sending or moving your mission-critical data to a third party service provider online is never an easy attempt. Doing such thing without employing proper support can lead to very serious issues that can cripple the entire activity and/or the organisation.

Therefore, you need to examine your service provider, whose mission is to bring to the table a particular skill set to your organisation. More so, exploring the skill sets of the service provider should provide you with the freedom you need to develop the particular talent you have. If your service provider can say that they can bring talents to complement your business, then you are in good hands. Otherwise, it is time for you to search for the partner that will provide you with the freedom you need.

Cloud based services can abstract software and software infrastructure maintenance from your company at the same time optimising on the current hardware you already have. The service provider should be responsible for upgrading hardware and software, without any kind of downtime. Also, there should be availability of data system for your enterprise at all times. The data should be considerably scalable as well as activity that involve trouble shooting at the service provider’s end should flawlessly transfer you to the “hot site” or even to the “disaster recovery site” so as to provide your business with enough convenience option. Disaster recovery procedures must also be an integral part of the offerings. Data mirroring features should be automatic. Compliance to legal mandates must be incorporated into the backup process and archiving.

On a daily operation, there must be support services available for you to carry on your activities; and you should be allowed to refer or contact your technical support team members, assigned by your service provider, for any kind of problems. Customers that are using their services should be sure that they can get not less than 99.99% uptime. Ideally, 24/7 help desk should be provided by the service provider in order to make it easy for customers to get the help they need for their service. That can also make the customers to be sure of getting response from the service provider within 24 or at most 48 hours.

Another thing expected of the service provider is to regularly monitor the health of all customer accounts. If any suspicious activity is detected in the account, such activities must be logged in to the system and reported. In order to automatically trigger off warnings when there is any form of spur-of-the-moment activities, the software alerts must be configured right.

The cloud based support services must help to improve your return on investment (ROI). It must give evidence about the data storage model being marketed by your service provider to assist you in your exclusive business prospect.

Backup Technology is proud to be a 3D Hybrid partner of Asigra, which gives us the best support to reach our business goals.

Managed Service Providers for Cloud Data Backup & Recovery

November 20, 2015 Rob Mackle

In the cloud backup and storage market, Asigra is considered cost effective, resourceful, compliant, secure, and reliable solution. Asigra software was launched in the year 1986 as data backup solution. Service providers, who are interested to provide data backup and storage services to organisations, consider partnering with Asigra to offer a reliable and secure service. Asigra software can be configured to scale up or down; makes data management easy, and offers high tech solutions, with excellent features.

In fact, Asigra cloud backup and recovery software can access the network to prepare backup for applications, operating systems, and file systems by utilising high tech industry recognised standards. Asigra architecture saves time, offers support, and requires a few resources to work. Managed service providers are able to encrypt important data of clients. Asigra is reliable to transmit encrypted data from desktop, repositories, laptop or remote offices without any security threats.

Since Asigra launched its software back in 1986, no hacks has been reported. As a result, there has not been any data loss or breaches. The software allows all kinds of data to be backed up with the help of a digital signature. All important data on disk is based on self-describing format. Asigra software activates certificate of destruction automatically for particular data that is wiped out from the repository. Security procedures are improved through password rotation and password management features. There are options to create new effective passwords that can be changed randomly on regular basis to improve security.

The Continuous Data Protection (CDP) feature of Asigra offers unrestricted granularity. Customers are given advantage to recover data through RPO (Recovery Point Objective). When CDP files are saved by users at computers, backup is made to avoid data loss. Moreover, this software pays attention on any change in target file and brings same changes in backup file as soon as these changes are noticed. In other words, Asigra is dependable backup option, effective for email backup, as well as file system to enhance recovery procedures of critical data.

Benefits of Asigra CDP:
• CDP gives surety that updated data on hard drive is backed up;
• Traditional backups were able to recover data that was backed up only. However, CDP is automatic and it is backed up to the cloud happens as soon as data is saved on the drive;
• CDP offers latest type of data protection system, where record of previous data is also maintained;
• Asigra can optionally make local backups and encrypt the data and backup to a centralised repository. As a result, recovery time objectives and backup window are decreased to a minimum.
Service providers understand the significance of legally compliant Asigra. Automatic disk based solutions are capable to work without human interference. In order to recover important information, backed up data is collected from offsite repositories through private or public cloud.

Asigra’s on-boarding features minimise time needed to go to market as well as operational costs for backup and data recovery. It allows service providers to develop a variety of services along with numerous service level agreements. Through self service option, end users are given chance to create new accounts and integrated vaults. Clients are able to do these tasks without interference of service provider. In short, MSPs that are using Asigra software are able to meet the demands of customers.

Reduce Operational Costs by Modernising your Data Centre

November 9, 2015 Kris Price

An increase in energy cost, outdated data centre infrastructure, and lack of responsiveness to current business requirements are some of the reasons that contribute to the decision to modernise a data centre. Administrators of data centre evaluate long-established approaches and come to a decision on how to restructure, update and organise data centres to meet business requirements. Moreover, data centre modernisation help in providing high-tech services to clients for business continuity, data recovery, regulatory compliance and disaster recovery. Data centre administrators need to pay attention on various ways of overcoming operating costs to gain competitive position in the market.

Plans and strategies are the backbone of data centre modernisation. Process starts with an appraisal of existing IT realities and updated vision of the future. Efforts are made in the direction of standardising, consolidating, automating, virtualising infrastructure, migrating, supporting tools and architectural frameworks. Deep associations among business units, application development, and IT infrastructure operations will help in finding in-house problems and solutions to pressing issues.

Data centre need to plan a way out by finding where investments are achievable in the network infrastructure, storage and server area. In addition, modified service levels are conveyed to accomplish performance metrics that are associated with transformational activities and intermittent reassessment to form business strategy.

It is the job of data centre admin to choose and put into practise most up-to-date technologies. Returns on Investments (ROI) are determined by the optimisation level of server. Modernised data centres are need to do their best to improve protocols for policy management, operational reliability and competitive position in market. Data centre are interested to increase their savings by working on reducing system downtime, and human errors. They also need to work on improving success rates for patch rollouts and applications.

For contemporary data centres, agility is the hallmark, as these are designed for long-term growth. Provision of latest servers and immediate response to change requests are features of the modern data centre. They are capable to accomplish resources immediately through designing flexible and effective computing model.

In data centres, power is considered one of the significant factors in increasing operational costs. Thermal assessment determines the temperature in various areas to find out hot and over cooled areas. In order to keep the temperature in balancing positions, optimal equipment and raised floor approach is used.

Data centres need to operate and develop by checking energy efficiency. Reliable data centres give guarantee that they are following green computing while reducing carbon footprints. It is possible for data centres to decrease energy use, Carbon Dioxide emission by combining storage units, processors, and storage sites, data centres can save maximum energy and operational cost. To reduce cooling cost, arctic locations are much favourable where the environment is much cooler and will be easier on the cooling fans and help with maintaining an optimal temperature.