In the last three years, 96% of global IT decision-makers have experienced at least one outage. The average downtime following a ransomware attack is three weeks. And according to ITIC’s 2021 Hourly Cost of Downtime survey, 91% percent of mid-sized and large enterprises say just one hour of server downtime would cost them $300,000 or more—half of whom believe it would exceed $1M.

Data is the lifeblood of any business. Without a reliable and robust disaster recovery plan in place, any unexpected disruption—whether from hardware failure, natural disaster, or a cyberattack—can result in data loss, prolonged downtime, crippling financial losses, and reputational damage.

 

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) has emerged as one of the most effective and efficient approaches to disaster recovery in recent years. With the ability to back up all cloud data and applications in a managed data center, the pay-as-you-go cloud service model not only safeguards critical assets, but also ensures rapid restoration, minimizing the impact of disruptions on business operations. In essence, DRaaS simplifies disaster recovery, keeping your business resilient and operational in the face of adversity.

 

Here are some steps you can take to ensure you’re harnessing your DRaaS solution’s full potential to bolster your disaster recovery strategy and protect your business:

 

1. Prioritize your critical assets: Identify and prioritize your organization’s critical data, applications, and systems—and reassess regularly. Not everything requires the same level of protection. By focusing on what’s most important, you streamline your DRaaS strategy and allocate resources more effectively, ensuring the highest level of protection for your most crucial assets.
2. Define clear RTOs and RPOs: To align your recovery efforts with your business goals and needs, clearly define your Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) based on the criticality of your assets. In doing so, you not only tailor your DRaaS solution to meet the specific recovery needs of your business, but you also ensure it is equipped to deliver the required levels of availability and data protection.
3. Regularly test and validate: Conduct regular testing and validation of your DRaaS solution, including planned recovery drills and unexpected failover tests. By routinely putting your DRaaS plan to the test, you can proactively identify any potential weaknesses or gaps in your disaster recovery strategy and fine-tune it as needed.
4. Incorporate automation and orchestration tools: Use automation and orchestration tools to simplify the failover and failback processes. When you automate these critical tasks, you can ensure swift response to disruptions, free of human error, to maintain business continuity.
5. Continuously monitor and make improvements: Regularly review and improve your disaster recovery plan based on lessons learned from testing and real-world incidents. This iterative approach helps you stay proactive in identifying potential vulnerabilities and adapting your DRaaS strategy to evolving threats and business needs.

Disaster recovery is a critical component of your business’s IT strategy. With a DRaaS approach that is well managed, you can solidify a resilient footing against disruptions, safeguard your critical assets, and ensure the continuity of your business operations in the face of what could otherwise be catastrophically damaging events.

At Zunesis, we can help you adopt a comprehensive DRaaS approach that protects your critical data and applications. With advanced expertise in HPE’s backup, recovery, and ransomware protection capabilities, we’ll partner with you to ensure your business stays resilient and operational, even in the face of unexpected events.

For more information, contact us here.

 Downtime costs businesses an average of $84,650 per hour.  A natural disaster or cyber-attack can result in weeks of downtime for a business that’s not prepared, delivering a massive financial blow. Even worse, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, 40% of small and mid-sized businesses never reopen after a natural disaster, and an additional 25% reopen but fail within a year. These statistics are staggering—and sadly, we’ve seen scenarios like these play out many times with our clients.

The threat of man-made and natural catastrophes is real—and in most cases, it’s something you can’t control. What you can control, however, are the safeguards you have in place to help your business recover when disaster strikes.

 

Enter Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS).

DRaaS is a pay-as-you go cloud service model that delivers backup services in a managed data center to ensure access and functionality to IT infrastructure after a disaster. It gives an organization a total system backup for rapid restoration of data servers and applications in the event of system failure. By replicating and backing up all cloud data and applications, DRaaS protects data, limits downtime, and shortens Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) when a disaster happens.

 

7 Benefits of Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service:

 

1. Cost savings: According to Gartner, 55% to 65% of I&O leaders say they overspend in backup and recovery by at least 30%. With DRaaS, you get the same capabilities and reliability as the more costly on-premise DR systems, but in a pay-as-you-go model whereby you only pay for what you use. Plus, with the ability to rapidly recover from a disaster, you stand to save your business hundreds of thousands of dollars—or more—from unplanned downtime or lost data.
2. Immediate recovery: The longer it takes for your business to recover following a disaster, the more money your business will lose. By backing up your data to a secondary infrastructure, DRaaS offers instantaneous failover, so your business can return to normal operations within minutes—not hours or weeks.
3. Secure data backup storage: DRaaS offers a multi-layer security approach designed to address most vulnerabilities. Employing the latest security protocols, with frequent patches, multi-factor authentication, encryption, ongoing audits, and more, DRaaS providers ensure comprehensive data security.
4. Peace of mind: With redundancy for all your critical business information systems, DRaaS eliminates the worry and pressures associated with meeting recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO), while helping you stay GDPR compliant.
5. Reduced administrative burden: Managing disaster recovery eats up a lot of time for your internal staff—and keeps them in react mode. By outsourcing your disaster recovery to a third-party provider who will manage all DR planning and maintenance activities, you free up internal staff to proactively focus on other critical IT functions, achieve greater levels of productivity, and realize greater efficiencies.
6. Specialized expertise: A DRaaS provider has advanced expertise in backup, recovery, and data security. With access to a team who knows everything there is to know about implementation, replication, failover, and more, you can unload a heavy and complex burden while letting the experts do what they do best.
7. Scale on demand: Because you only pay for what you use, not only do you avoid overprovisioning for an in-house solution, but you also get the flexibility to scale up or down as needed. If your needs grow, you can quickly, easily, and efficiently upgrade your service

At Zunesis, we can help you achieve modern data protection with HPE GreenLake for data protection. Ask us about how your company can install a free trial of HPE Greenlake backup and recovery.

For more information about HPE’s industry-leading backup, recovery, and ransomware protection capabilities, contact us today.

As A Service Model

When you want to take on new technology these days, the options seem endless.  The As A Service model is the leading trend in modernizing your IT environment.  Why not pay for what you use each month rather than investing in an expensive piece of hardware.  Capex has gone. Opex is the future of budgets and is rapidly changing.  Who wants to drive with gas when electric is so much more efficient?  This train of thought is driving (pun intended) how IT professionals are thinking and responding to the services offered.

 

Disaster Recovery Taking Center Stage

Disaster Recovery often gets put on the back burner. Storage and compute have always been the exciting leaders in the data center. Though in a time when cyber threats and ransomware are on the rise, disaster recovery is taking center stage.  To make everyone’s life easier, more efficient, and profitable, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) has been at the forefront of OPEX budgets.

This cloud computing and backup service model uses cloud resources to protect applications and data from disruption caused by a disaster.  An organization that has a complete system backup allows for continuity in the event of failure.  A DRaaS solution provides an easy way to move a production workload to the cloud. Once that instance is deployed, it can act as a sandbox for further experimentation.  Necessity is the mother of all inventions, but experiment builds the momentum for innovation.

 

What is your RTO (Recovery Time Objective)?

How fast can your organization recover from the moment of a disaster to the moment you return to regular operation? Businesses today have no tolerance for downtime. DRaaS provides a critical bridge, allowing companies to operate remotely while normal processes are restored.

While natural disasters are commonly associated with the need for DRaaS, five of the most common reasons an organization uses DRaaS are:

1. On-premises power outages
2. Security-related attacks
3. Hardware and network failures
4. Software, IT system errors
5. Datacenter failures

Saving vs. Spending

How much can you save is the new mantra on every organization’s mind while becoming modernized!  Disaster recovery is often seen as a burdensome cost when it should be thought of as an investment. For any organization considering transitioning to infrastructure as a service (IaaS), DRaaS can act as a stepping stone to full virtualization.

Carbonite Recover is the DRaaS offering that can help you achieve all these goals.  While securely replicating critical systems from a primary environment to the cloud, they ensure an up-to-date secondary copy for failover at any moment.  Who doesn’t want to minimize downtime as well as cost?  With DRaaS you pay for what you use, when you use it, not for idle resources.

 

 

Quality Modernization

Carbonite’s Recover allows businesses to enjoy all the benefits of resilient IT without owning the hardware or being responsible for maintenance.  Modernizing or minimalist, both of which recognize that less means more.  Who doesn’t want the freedom of less responsibility!

Today, it is common to combine modern and legacy systems operating side-by-side. Not all DRaaS vendors support legacy systems, but Carbonite continues to be an industry leader in supporting many different legacy platforms.  When protecting your environment with Carbonite, you can also count on them to support other platforms such as:

• Windows
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• CentOS
• VMware and Hyper-V
• IBM iSeries and AIX
• Solaris

Carbonite’s DRaaS advantages are built-in, allowing multi-sites 100 percent cloud computing.  The resources are replicated to many different sites to ensure continuous backup if one or more sites are unavailable.  Depending on the customers’ requirements, the ability to be granular or comprehensive can reduce cost with flexible protection.

Not only does Carbonite support a series of legacy and cloud-based platforms, but they also offer more control than competitive ISP solutions.  They also provide flexible failover options that don’t require spare machines or extra fees, along with 24/7 phone support.  DRaaS is one of those things you can’t afford to not have.

See how one retail chain stays in control with Carbonite Recover in this case study.

 

Value Added

Zunesis partnered with Carbonite many years ago, not just as a reseller but as a customer.  We have relied on the many advantages of using their products.  We can attest to their cutting-edge technology, quality customer service, and competitive pricing.  For more information on all the Carbonite products, contact us today.

What Is Azure Site Recovery?

 

Business outages are caused by natural events and operational failures. Organizations need a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy that keeps apps and data safe and available during both planned and unplanned downtime. It also needs to be able to recover those apps and data to normal working conditions as soon as possible. Azure Site Recovery meets these needs through the following avenues:

 

• Simple, automated protection and disaster recovery in the cloud
• Orchestrated disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS)
• Replication and disaster recovery to Azure
• Continuous health monitoring with Site Recovery

 

Why Site Recovery?

 

There are a host of reasons why Azure Site Recovery is an excellent option for BCDR, including recovery in the cloud, resiliency, testing, flexible failover, and continuous monitoring.

 

Disaster Recovery in the Cloud

Replicate workloads running on VMs and physical servers to Azure, rather than to a secondary site. This eliminates the cost and complexity of maintaining a secondary data center. With Site Recovery, you have the ability to replicate any workload running on-premises, Hyper-V VMs, and Windows/Linux physical servers.

 

Resilience

Site Recovery orchestrates replication and failover, without intercepting application data. Replicated data is stored in Azure storage, with the resilience that provides. When failover occurs, Azure VMs are created based on the replicated data.

 

Testing Without Disruption

Azure Site Recovery allows you to easily run test failovers to support disaster recovery drills without affecting production environments.

 

Rich Recovery Plans with Flexible Failover and Recovery

Recovery plans allow modeling to customize failover and recovery of multi-tier applications spread over multiple VMs. Order groups within plans, and add scripts and manual actions. Recovery plans can be integrated with Azure automation runbooks. You can run planned failovers for expected outages with zero data loss, or be prepared for unplanned failovers with minimal data loss. Easily fail back to the primary site when it’s available again.

 

Continuous Health Monitoring

Site Recovery monitors the state of your protected instances continuously and remotely from Azure.

 

Interested in learning more about how Azure Site Recovery can improve (or even become) your “plan for a rainy day”? Please contact us today to learn more about this exciting solution!