Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is the high tech safety net integral to your organisation’s business continuity plan; it will keep it running if the worst happens and potentially fatal issues impact your IT systems.
It takes the complex and multi-layered work involved in planning and enacting a recovery plan out of your hands. Critically, it takes it off your premises, while still enabling you to maintain control of the recovery process and the systems and data you wish to protect.
Duplicating the data swirling around your organisation, it’s veritable lifeblood, sounds a relatively simple principle, but the reality has the potential to be much more complex.
Imagine for a moment the millions of unique pieces of data that your organisation generates every working day. Now run through the logistics of ensuring that there are copies of each of these thousands of items, duplicated across media and somehow sent to off-site storage.
Ensuring that all of this happens at the same time as running your core business and maintaining the standard IT provision you depend upon is going to consume both time and resources, and that’s why we believe a DRaaS solution from CCE must be part of your business continuity plan.
It’s a rare day if your organisation’s IT infrastructure has performed optimally for the whole day without running into difficulties that have affected productivity.
The point is that IT, the unseen power behind your organisation, is far from infallible despite what you think, or are told. The daily hiccups and glitches everyone experiences are a reminder that the systems your livelihood depends upon, are only ever one event away from disaster.
The disaster in question could be a hardware or structural failure, a natural disaster such as a flood or fire, or a cyber-security issue such as a ransomware or denial of service attack.
Any of these could lead to a loss of data and critical applications. You will suffer costly downtime during which neither you nor your customers can access your systems. Long term reputational damage is guaranteed and might just prove terminal to your organisation.
According to Osterman Research, 22% of businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees are forced to cease operations following a ransomware attack. And on average the loss to small businesses thanks to the downtime caused by ransomware attacks was more than £75,000 per incident.
Even if an incident isn’t severe enough to close a company down completely, it can be extremely costly, with Gartner estimating that downtime costs the average business more than £250,000 per hour.
It’s also important to consider not just how much a business might lose through interruption to normal service, but the reputational damage and potential for broken contractual obligations to provide a service to their clients, which could just make the disaster even worse.
It should be clear now that DRaaS really should form a vital safety net for any modern business, to ensure disrupted systems are out of action for the minimum possible time.
Disaster planning use to require a risk assessment to identify critical assets such as financial data, confidential customer details and banking information. Then duplicating everything to a remote storage system was needed, which hopefully mirrored the security standards of the original system, particularly in regulated industries.
Provision for somewhere to restore the data to and systems that mirror the original would still be required to ensure a quick recovery. DRaaS, on the other hand, takes the bulk of that work out of your hands and places it in those of an experienced service provider like CCE.
All of which meant the high cost would typically be borne by only the largest enterprises, ensuring most SME were left just hoping a business-ending disaster never occurred. But that has changed now.
With DRaaS, there’s no need for you to take on the work and initial capital outlay of creating and maintaining your own off-site environment. We will create a cloud-based DR environment which will immediately come on stream when you trigger a recovery.
Our DRaaS solution uses a tailored Cloud solution and advanced software like Veeam, which offers both backup and replication, to ensure if disaster strikes that critical data will quickly be available, along with the platforms and systems that utilise that data.
A key advantage of our service to ensure business continuity, is our ability to mix Private and Public clouds to deliver a hybrid solution tailored to your exact needs, which can be scaled up or down as circumstances dictate, to reflect changes in your organisation.
We offer it on a ‘pay for what you use’ basis rather than involving up-front capital outlay, with the solution tailored to offer as much or as little protection as you want – we will advise what we believe your organisation will need.
Once in place, a DR plan of this kind can be tested simply and regularly to ensure that failover will only be a click away from anywhere in the world, if it should ever be needed. And remember, if you do not rigorously test your plan regularly, you might as well not have one. We use Veeam in our DRaaS solution because it provides a comprehensive availability strategy encompassing all aspects of replication and recovery with straightforward licencing and pricing.
The fact that it operates in an application, storage and operating system agnostic manner makes it accessible to businesses of every size and complexity, with a service that offers every client the ability to maintain control thanks to a close relationship with CCE, already a trusted partner.
Our service is tailored to your unique needs and we’re on hand 24/7/365 with support when needed Data backed up, systems replicated and failover easily accessible around the clock, every minute of every hour of every day – that’s the recovery safety net promised by DRaaS from CCE.