Disaster Recovery as a Service: The Key to Business Continuity

Every minute that your organization’s data isn’t available is costly. Regardless of the cause—a hardware failure, software glitch, human error, malicious attack, or natural disaster—unplanned downtime is painful.  

The Uptime Institute’s Annual Outages Analysis 2023 survey notes that “the number of outages globally increase year-on-year as the industry expands.” The survey also points out that 60 percent of respondents reported an outage in the past three years: two-thirds of those outages cost more than $100,000, and 25 percent cost over $1 million. But the costs can be much higher than those reported in the survey—in both dollars and reputational damage. 

While it’s impossible to eliminate the risk of unplanned downtime completely, there are things you can do to minimize your risk exposure. So, when downtime happens, you can be in a position to recover quickly, no matter where your applications and data are running—on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment. 

You Need More Than Local Backups 

While local backups will meet your requirements when recovering your IT systems from server failures or other minor issues, a site-wide disaster can make those backups useless. Even if you have backups stored in a different location, operationalizing recovery may be incredibly complex—especially if you cannot ensure that your restored images are clean. If the images aren’t clean, there is a risk of reintroducing the underlying issue back into your environment. 

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), where a vendor provides a recovery environment, simplifies the amount of work required from you to recover your critical systems from unplanned downtime.

It’s a simple equation when you weigh the expense of implementing DRaaS for data backup and disaster recovery against the cost of downtime. And a single incident is all it takes to confirm the value of that investment. However, several important considerations come into play when choosing a DRaaS provider.

Orchestrated Failover Ensures Business Continuity 

One crucial requirement is that your DRaaS provider offers a resilient infrastructure and the flexibility and scale to recover your applications and data without worrying about underlying capacity. Near-unlimited scalability that can adapt in real-time as your business continuity requirements change and provides orchestrated recovery, allowing you to specify the order in which to restore applications and workloads. 

Arcserve Cloud Services is architected from the ground up to be scalable and performant and offers simple and easy-to-configure orchestrated recovery. You can use Arcserve Cloud for Backup as a Service (BaaS) or DRaaS—the choice is yours, depending on your business needs. And Arcserve BaaS can be hosted in any cloud—including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Wasabi.

You’ll also want a complete, orchestrated virtual failover to the cloud. Orchestrated failover is a sophisticated disaster recovery and business continuity strategy that provides a systematic, coordinated process for shifting your business’s critical IT systems, data, and applications from your on-premises infrastructure to cloud-based resources. A pre-configured restore sequence offers data loss protection and minimizes downtime, whether the cause is a natural disaster, hardware failure, or cyberattack. That’s precisely what Arcserve Cloud Services delivers.  

Arcserve: Unique Cloud Services Features 

Arcserve Cloud Services cloud-based DRaaS streamlines data backup and disaster recovery management so you can get your critical systems back online quickly and easily. Our partnership with Google Cloud Platform means you add DRaaS with global scale, speed, elasticity, and layered security. You also add built-in redundancy and tighter security with strictly limited access.  

But Arcserve’s premium-level Cloud Services stand out thanks to its patented ability to pre-stage site-wide failover processes so you can test or execute a failover with a single click. With Cloud Services, you access the highly customizable disaster-recovery cloud anytime, anywhere, with an easy-to-use, self-service online portal. Select the service level to meet your needs and use pre-configured or customized retention settings, depending on your RPOs. It’s that simple. 

The portal features a dashboard that displays the status of all accounts, machines, seed drives, bare metal recovery (BMR) drives, virtual machines (VMs), and account space used. You can set individual account alerts to notify yourself of inactive uploads, new machine activations, deletions, and when virtual machines (VMs) are running. Other alerts include seed and bare metal recovery (BMR) drive request updates and when data growth exceeds set thresholds.  

Cost-Effective, Cost-Efficient 

Another high-value feature of Cloud Premium is that it includes 30 days (or 720 hours) of free virtualization per machine per year. That lets you frequently test your IT business continuity plan to ensure readiness—without added costs. Arcserve Cloud Services also reduces costs and the staffing that managing a disaster recovery infrastructure typically requires.  

Look to Arcserve technology partners for expert guidance when considering your data disaster recovery options.  

I hope you found this information helpful. Contact us anytime about your data resilience needs.