IT Disasters – Part 3 – Minimizing Risk with DRaaS (Video)

Roger Walton talks about IT disasters, and in this final part, addresses minimizing your risk with DRaaS, Disaster Recovery as a Service.

In my earlier segments, we’ve reviewed the many possible causes of extended IT outages and looked at how painful they can be to your business’s bottom line. Here I’d like to discuss what you can do to minimize the impact of IT disasters on your business. There are three things in particular that you should do to limit the impact of IT outages.

The first thing you should do is to put in place a resilient IT system. Now, pretty much all PCG clients maintain backups of their critical systems, with one copy locally and a second copy stored in the cloud. Backups are absolutely essential, but they may not be sufficient to prevent an extended outage. The reason is that many IT disasters may prevent your existing systems from operating, so they need to be rebuilt or replaced for your applications and databases to be fully available. Even simple systems can take a week or more to rebuild, and complex systems much longer. So maintaining continuity depends on having alternate systems prebuilt and ready for use.

The gold standard is to build a true, fully redundant, high availability configuration with servers and storage merit in two different locations, with both systems running continuously and with logic in place to keep both systems synchronized with each other. Such configuration provides a high degree of confidence in nonstop operation, but duplication and synchronization don’t come cheap and is simply too expensive for many small and medium-sized businesses. But now, thanks to cloud computing, we have a much more affordable solution; DRaaS.

DRaaS, for Disaster Recovery as a Service, is a new option for high availability that maintains a server in the cloud, complete with its applications and databases. The DRaaS server is also kept updated so it can replicate your primary server, but other than for periodic testing, it is not running and therefore is much more affordable than an active, fully redundant server.

The DRaaS server can be spun up whenever needed, a process that takes well under an hour to complete. DRaaS can also be set up so that the alternate network connections are already in place and can be activated quickly and reliably so your users can quickly get access to the backup systems. The key to success is regular testing to make sure that the backup systems work as expected. For many businesses, DRaaS is an excellent choice, providing resiliency at a very reasonable cost. A resilient IT system can greatly reduce the frequency and duration of extended IT outages, but it doesn’t completely eliminate IT disasters.

The second precaution you should take is to buy insurance. Insurance is particularly helpful to offset the recovery costs, whether repairing facilities or rebuilding and replacing IT systems. Business interruption insurance is also available, but you should pay attention to exclusions, deductions, and the waiting period, typically 72 hours. You may find that business interruption insurance is better geared for much longer and comprehensive events than a typical extended IT outage.

The third thing you should do is to create a business continuity plan. A business continuity plan will help in several ways. It will force you to determine just how long an outage your business can tolerate, which will in turn inform you on where you should proactively avoid future costs by putting mitigation solutions such as DRaaS in place. It will prepare team members for what they need to do after a disaster, so that when one does occur, they will respond faster and more effectively.

So, in summary, disasters are part of life and they will happen. Similarly, IT disasters will certainly happen eventually, and when they do, they can be extremely costly. To ensure your business will survive in the long term, it’s imperative that you take some proactive steps. These should include creating a business continuity plan, purchasing appropriate insurance, and ensuring you have a resilient IT system. For most businesses, DRaaS should be among the options they consider to meet this last objective. With DRaaS now available, this goal has become much more attainable for small businesses.