Lately, natural disasters seem to be featured regularly in the news. From storms in Hawaii to wildfires in California and flooding on the East Coast, every part of the U.S. is being affected. These natural disasters are stark reminders that designing and implementing a formal disaster recovery plan is crucial for companies.
For companies that lack an adequate disaster recovery plan, the cloud can be the solution. Implementing disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) has many advantages over designing your own plan.
Here’s an overview of 5 benefits DRaaS brings to your company:
1) Affordability
For many smaller companies, cost can be a barrier to adopting a formal disaster recovery plan. Building a redundant system for backup and recovery requires purchasing a second set of equipment at another site on which to duplicate your data center. Testing the disaster recovery plan interrupts production, cutting into your profits.
With DRaaS, your business avoids upfront capital expenses. Instead, you rent space in the cloud at a predictable monthly rate. Cloud-based disaster recovery frees your company from some of the cost and burden of constant upgrades. The provider updates its equipment regularly.
2) Optimal RPOs and RTOs
A disaster recovery plan is only as good as its recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs). If a system takes too long to recover, your company loses valuable production time. An outage can rob your business of 65% of its productivity. RPOs are also crucial. If your data center isn’t synced with your recovery site, you can permanently lose valuable information.
DRaaS allows for automatic failover. Recovery windows narrow considerably, ensuring optimum availability. The cloud recovery site can be synced with your on-site data center to ensure that your data is complete, accurate, and up-to-date. The right DRaaS solution will replicate your data in real time to avoid any data loss.
3) Geographical Diversity
Finding the right location for your recovery site can be a challenge. Some companies make the mistake of locating their secondary site too close to their primary data center or partnering with a disaster recovery provider located in the same area. If your disaster recovery resources are in close proximity to your business, they could both be affected by the same flood or power outage.
The cloud allows you to store disaster recovery resources far away from your primary data center. The right DRaaS provider will offer many geographically dispersed sites. With DRaaS, you can rest assured that your disaster recovery site will escape the effects of a local emergency.
4) Scalability
Keeping a disaster recovery plan up to date can be a challenge. Your business may outgrow your backup and recovery resources. Workloads may change, putting a strain on your recovery site. If you exceed your backup capacity, you lose the data you need to make decisions.
As with any cloud solution, scaling your DRaaS is easy. When your needs increase, simply request more cloud resources for backup and recovery. There is no need to go through a lengthy provisioning and implementation process.
5) Integration
Companies that do have a formal disaster recovery plan often piece one together out of various backup and recovery tools.
DRaaS enables companies to implement an integrated disaster recovery plan that covers the entire business. All your disaster recovery tools and resources are in the cloud. Around-the-clock monitoring and support ensures that you have complete visibility into the solution.
Always Be Prepared
The accessibility of DRaaS means there’s no excuse for being unprepared when disaster strikes. Even the smallest companies can obtain enterprise-level disaster recovery resources to protect their business from a cataclysmic event.
FirstLight offers DRaaS for companies throughout the Northeast that are seeking a comprehensive and affordable disaster recovery plan. Our DRaaS solution checks all the boxes. Automatic failover and continuous replication ensure that you recover instantaneously without data loss. You maintain control over your data while receiving 24/7 support and benefiting from free testing.
Does your business lack a formal disaster recovery plan? Turn to FirstLight for DRaaS.
