3 reasons why your business should adopt DRaaS

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?

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

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

Our Customers

  • ATOS
  • Age UK
  • Alliance Pharma
  • Liverpool Football Club
  • CSC
  • Centrica
  • Citizens Advice
  • City of London
  • Fujitsu
  • Government Offices
  • HCL
  • LK Bennett
  • Lambretta Clothing
  • Leicester City
  • Lloyds Register
  • Logica
  • Meadowvale
  • National Farmers Union
  • Network Rail
  • PKR

Sales question? Need support? Start a chat session with one of our experts!

For support, call the 24-hour hotline:

UK: 0800 999 3600
US: 800-220-7013

Or, if you've been given a screen sharing code:

Existing customer?

Click below to login to our secure enterprise Portal and view the real-time status of your data protection.

Login to Portal