When was the last time you experienced unplanned downtime? How much did it affect your organization?
Ninety-one percent of respondents in a 2013 Ponemon Institute study reported experiencing unplanned downtime in the last two years. Although that's not a shocking statistic to those in the cloud arena, what is alarming is the fact that an estimated 30 percent of organizations that experience a severe outage never actually recover.
Business leaders often think a disaster is something that happens to someone else. When most people think of disasters, they immediately think about hurricanes or earthquakes. But a disaster doesn't have to be a naturally occurring one. It could be human error or a cyber attack. Therefore, it's important to have a plan B to protect your mission-critical applications and data. It's also important to know that it's more than a loss in revenue or five minutes of downtime—an IT disaster can wreak havoc on your overall brand and customer loyalty.
Here are six reasons why not to cut disaster recovery (DR) from your budget.
1. Disaster Recovery Is Cost Effective
On average it takes organizations two days to recover from an IT disaster, according to a 2012 Ponemon Institute study on disaster recovery. The same study found that this duration equates to $366,363 in costs a year. There are some hidden costs to experiencing downtime, however, such as lost revenue and damage to the brand. For example, when a major airline's reservation system goes down for eight hours straight, it leaves customers stranded, scrambling to make other arrangements and thinking twice the next time they book a flight.
Organizations that use disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) providers reported cost savings as the leading benefit of using the public cloud for disaster recovery, according to a study by the Aberdeen Group—a research firm helping businesses understand the implications and results of technology deployments. You don't have to worry about a large capital investment; you can trade that in by contracting DRaaS.
Costs to work with a DRaaS provider vary depending on how many virtual machines an organization needs to replicate and the size of the data. Costs can range from $60 to $120 per month per virtual machine and can vary depending on factors such as recovery-point objective (RPO), recovery-time objective (RTO), storage and so on.
2. DR Is Easy to Implement
Disaster recovery in the cloud is now more attainable for businesses of all sizes than it was five years ago. Before virtualization, disaster recovery would cost at least three times as much because an organization needed to have multiple data centers, specialized software and large network connections. To do this in the physical world is extremely costly. That's why only the largest of enterprises were able to do it. Now, virtualization makes disaster recovery easier by encapsulating virtual machines (VMs) into a few files, making the data portable and in turn reducing costs.
DR solutions also give users the flexibility to take a look at their applications and define how they want them to be recovered. Do they want to protect the entire infrastructure? Do they want to protect just Tier 1 applications? Do they need a variable recovery time and variable recovery point from Tier 1 down to Tier 3 applications? Gone are the days of having to build a secondary site identical to a primary site and incur all the additional management costs and operational challenges.
3. DR Reduces Data Loss
The risk of business interruption, loss of business-critical data and the length of time to recover that data are three leading pressures driving organizations' use of the public cloud for disaster recovery, according to a study by the Aberdeen Group. DRaaS users are able to recover three times faster and drive up the percentage of data they're able to recover twofold.
Consider this example: Having your company in Delray Beach, Fla. is great…until a hurricane hits. That's what happened to Fleet Lease Disposal when Hurricane Wilma struck in October 2005 and took down the company's main office and primary data center. Although it successfully recovered and operated for four months from its backup office in New Jersey, four years later, Fleet Lease discovered that it lacked adequate hardware and bandwidth to support data recovery at its secondary site.
In working with a DRaaS provider, Fleet Lease Disposal was able to restore its IT infrastructure and data in less than one hour, save thousands of dollars and man-hours a year, and achieve an 18-month return on investment. With replication and highly available cloud-computing resources, the company now knows it can count on quick access to its applications and data—especially during hurricane season.
4. DR Restores Applications and Operations Quickly and Effectively
According to a survey conducted by the Aberdeen Group, businesses that use DRaaS reported faster recovery time from downtime incidents as the second leading benefit of relying on the public cloud.
Many believe backing up data on tapes is the equivalent of DR. Protecting data is important, but the ability to recover applications efficiently and quickly is essential in restoring operations. Having data on tapes or using data storage without virtual resources and the ability to easily test isn't disaster recovery; it's just off-site back up and not true business continuity.
For example, one major global biotechnology firm dramatically simplified its recovery process by closing one of its data centers and moving from an environment that employed multiple technologies to support the replication of systems and data to a single solution that automates the recovery of all applications.
5. Testing 1, 2, 3…
Businesses can put their DR plan to the test anytime throughout the year without bringing down production. It's extremely important to ensure applications and data or IT environments come up on another site and no data is lost. Businesses can conduct planned or unplanned outages in the first few months of replication to ensure their DR plan works.
In a 2012 study, Forrester reported that only about half of companies conduct full tests once a year. Although organizations cite limited employee resources as the biggest stumbling block, cloud DR tests are now more automated and require less manual intervention.
When Verdande Technology needed a way to extend its infrastructure without making a significant investment, it turned to a DRaaS provider to provide a flexible, cost-effective means to extend its testing environment and eliminate the hardware and operational headaches at the same time.
"We have the flexibility and control we need," said Peter Varlien, IT systems engineer at Verdande Technology. "We can remotely configure a test bed according to testing requirements, and our DRaaS provider bills us only for what we've used. We don't have to worry about when, where or how we need to test anymore!"
The value of DR testing is to ensure all systems you want to replicate are recovered and that you have access to them. Once you are in the middle of an actual DR event, it's too late.
Leading article image courtesy of IntelFreePress
About the Author
0 comments:
Post a Comment