How to avoid costly IT downtime

Whether it’s a cyberattack, hardware failure, or an act of nature, your IT systems might be unexpectedly crippled at any moment. In the past, to avoid costly downtime, companies invested large amounts of their IT budgets on their own expensive disaster recovery and backup solutions. Thankfully, companies no longer have to rely on these expensive products and now have a more cost-effective option: Disaster Recovery as a Service.

What is DRaaS?

Where a company would normally need to invest in their own servers, data storage and backup power for disaster recovery, DRaaS takes advantage of cloud infrastructure to ensure a company’s valuable IT systems are not crippled by a major disaster. This infrastructure allows a company to mirror their systems and run them entirely from the cloud in the case of a site-wide outage.

On its own, backup only gives you access to a copy of your data. But disaster recovery (DR) replicates your entire IT system, including virtual machines, emails, apps and other crucial operational systems. Quite simply, if these systems are down, your business cannot operate. However, because virtual machines are of no benefit to you without data, DR does offer backups. Ideally, your business should implement both backup and DS for a robust disaster recovery plan.

The benefits of DRaaS include:

• Quick recovery from a physical disaster or site-wide outage.
• Customised disaster plans that are tailored to a business’s unique needs.
• Systems can be up-and-running within 2 hours of a site-wide outage with SLA-backed RTO of less than 2 hours.
• Enterprise-level security and compliance.
• See improved productivity by freeing up IT resources to focus on their core responsibilities.
• All failover testing, reporting and health monitoring is done for you, ensuring systems are fully functional at all times.
• No setup or ongoing maintenance of your second data centre required.
• With $0 setup and a predictable, low monthly cost, DRaaS won’t break the bank.
• Select a plan from three different service levels to suit your needs.
• You only pay for what you need, when you need it — we have a solution that scales up or down in times of need.

Is DRaaS a Good Fit For Your Company?

To identify if DRaaS is right for your organisation, you need to ask:

• Do you have a disaster recovery plan, or is your disaster recovery plan outdated?
• If you have a disaster recovery site are you looking to reduce your costs?
• Do you have five or more servers?
• Do you have on-premises or AWS infrastructure?
• Does your company need to meet high levels of compliance and ensure low levels of risk?
• Do you want to ensure you have taken every step to protect your organisation should a disaster strike?
• Is your IT team under pressure and are you looking for cost-effective ways to reduce their current workload?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, your organisation should seriously consider a DRaaS solution.

At The Missing Link, we offer an interactive tool that will help you assess how disaster-ready your business is. Click here to take advantage of this tool and find out if you need a DRaaS solution. If you have any other queries about DRaaS or disaster recovery in general, be sure to contact us at The Missing Link today.