Businesses need a plan that allows them to continue after a disruption in IT services. For many, part of that plan includes Disaster Recovery as a Service – or DRaaS – which leverages cloud services as an alternative IT infrastructure that is ready to be started when needed (“cloud spin-up” in industry jargon). The beauty of DRaaS is its cost-efficiency: in particular, the minimal cost of maintaining cloud systems in a ready-to-use state.
IT brings tremendous value to an organization by making operational processes more efficient and by delivering innovative new ways of doing business. With that value comes a growing dependency on IT systems. A service outage for a few minutes is annoying, but if it continues for hours or days it brings business to a standstill and causes profound financial damage.
Disruptions can include:
- Natural disasters – weather-driven power outages and floods
- Unintentional acts – maintenance crews cutting cables or accidently fires
- Criminal acts – a disgruntled employee tampering with IT hardware or software or committing arson
- Risks inherent to IT – equipment failure and ransomware attacks
- Plain bad luck – a backup generator seizes after a primary power failure; a water cooler on a floor above the data closet develops a leak over a holiday weekend; a system fault activating a sprinkler system
IT outage disasters can disrupt business for a few days to many weeks or longer. Most are unpredictable, with the only certainty being that one or more will hit eventually.
How Does DRaaS Differ from Image Backup?
Most clients use our backup services to keep backup images of servers and other key devices in the cloud. Acronis, our backup partner, is one of the world’s leading providers of backup services, meeting rigorous compliance standards for secure, reliable operation including SOC1 and SOC2.
After a disaster, image backups can provide almost immediate access to individual files. But getting access to applications and databases often requires rebuilding or replacing the data center. DRaaS is designed specifically to short-circuit this process by activating replacement servers that can be accessed immediately, and provide service as long as necessary.
How Does DRaaS Work?
DRaaS requires two additional elements to be set up within Acronis cloud:
- Cloud servers and network gateways that are predefined and tested, but (aside from testing) are not activated until needed
- A second copy of the image backup is “in position” and ready for use by the cloud servers
The diagrams illustrate normal operations and how the network is reconfigured when a server is lost.
In a disaster, we activate cloud servers and sever connections to the primary servers (assuming the disaster hasn’t already accomplished this second step!). The routing policies are preconfigured to automatically reroute all connections to the cloud servers if the primary servers can’t be reached.
How Do I Know My Data Is Secure?
Your data is always encrypted before it leaves your location and remains encrypted until it is needed. In the event of a cloud spin-up, your data is decrypted and scanned for any malware. In particular, it is checking for inactivated ransomware that is hiding for future exploitation. If a particular image is unusable, the system will be reverted to the last clean image (see “RPO” below). Once the cloud server is spun up it is connected to your location by an encrypted tunnel.
How Do I Know It Will Work When Needed?
No backup solution is dependable unless it is thoroughly tested regularly. Our standard is every four months, unless you or a designee are part of the test and can confirm that access to key applications behaves as expected. As your MSP, whenever we make changes with the potential to impact DRaaS, we take additional steps to ensure that it will operate as required.
What are the RTO and RPO?
RTO is “Recovery Time Objective.” We implement Acronis disaster solution, is one of the fastest with spin-up times of less than 15 minutes, and named a Customers’ Choice by Gartner Peer Insights.
RPO stands for “Recovery Point Objective.” Our backup system creates a full cloud backup after each business day, and in many cases this is the image that would be spun up following a disaster. However, in the event that the latest version is corrupted (most likely through some form of criminal activity) we maintain multiple recovery points. Our standard is for cloud RPOs to span at least three months, with longer periods also available.
How Much Will DRaaS Save Me?
An IT outage has two costs – primary and secondary:
- Primary costs – operating costs of each day of operation without production, usually accumulated on a per-day basis for outage duration. The best total IT outage cost measurement is your annual operating cost divided by the number of days you’re open.
- Secondary costs – includes lost business opportunities that are never recovered and often grow exponentially with the length of an outage. For example, a shipment you never make because of a missed deadline, or customers that lose confidence because you can’t promptly address their service needs. Secondary costs also include management time consumed by communicating with customers and others about an outage.
For most businesses, these IT outages cost at least 1% of annual revenue for each outage day, so DRaaS will typically pay for itself in the first two days of an outage. And while some “disasters” can be remediated in days, others can take weeks or months to resolve.
What Makes PCG DRaaS Different?
PCGiT’s Acronis DRaaS system is among the fastest available, but a DRaaS solution is about much more than technology. It is the TEAM that implements the solution, tests it regularly, and maintains and updates documentation that ensures your data is secure. To keep your business running after a disaster, contact us today.
