Two words strike fear into any business owner – Disaster Recovery. What would be the cost to your business if you lost critical data, even for a day? Do you have a plan?
Unfortunately, many things are outside of your control. Imagine the unthinkable. Your business is impacted by fire or a natural disaster. Your business data is the lifeblood of your company and the amount you are collecting and storing is growing all the time.
Imagine the impact if you lost a day’s data, a week’s data, a year’s data, due to infrequent backup processes and an inadequate disaster recovery solution. What would happen? Could you recover?
In an ever changing world, the potential risk of losing access to your business systems or data is becoming greater and the challenge of mitigating against that risk may seem too complex or cost prohibitive.
Small and midsize companies have long been put off by the seemingly vast amount of computing and network infrastructure required, coupled with the human resources needed, to implement and manage a disaster recovery solution. However, having a disaster recovery plan for your data and systems could be the difference between losing everything or just a temporary glitch.
A virtualised infrastructure allows a service based approach to disaster recovery, meaning that business continuity planning is no longer the luxury of the corporate enterprise and is now affordable and realistic to every business on a scale up, scale down basis.
Business Continuity as a Service solutions remove a large proportion of the cost and complexity around delivering a robust data backup and disaster recovery solution. Using best of breed management technologies in conjunction with a cloud platform as the backup and replication target, it is possible to remove the need for vast capital expenditure, yet benefit from an environment that can ensure that you can quickly get up and running after any kind of data disaster.
Backup as a Service (BaaS) has a two-tiered architecture with data being backed up locally and then replicated to the cloud. This allows for quick data restores in the event of data loss but also protects businesses against a loss of site.
Whilst most solutions require full backups periodically or in some cases daily, some products only require an initial full backup and then from that point forward stores only incremental file changes, saving money in storage space, data transfer costs and server load.
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is a managed service that allows the replication of business critical workloads to the cloud. Using block level replication technology, DRaaS copies workload images, be they physical or virtual, on a nightly basis and keeps them as a non-production image in the cloud. This means that whilst the workload(s) are not in production you only pay for the disk space required for the replication.
A fully managed data backup and restore solution ensures business continuity, safeguards business information, increases productivity and reduces downtime for the same or less than a capital purchase that you have to manage yourself.
