How DRaaS Can Pay for Itself After a Single Incident

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) can be a lifesaver for any business. Rather than picking up the pieces after an incident, DRaaS lets you proactively plan for and respond to a failure event. Whether it’s a small disaster like hardware failure or a huge disaster like a hurricane, DRaaS keeps you covered. With a better way to respond, you’re less likely to lose data or suffer from downtime—either of which can be costly enough to shut a business down. But do these incidents really happen frequently enough for you to worry about them? Do you really need DRaaS? Let’s look at the threat landscape first, then how a small investment in DRaaS can save you thousands.   

Threats to Business Are Real and Growing

Business data has always been at risk from a myriad of digital attacks. Here are just a few of the threats businesses face when it comes to protecting data.

• Climate change is bringing new disasters
  According to NASA, a warming climate will lead to changes in precipitation patterns, more frequent and stronger hurricanes, as well as more frequent wildfires. Natural disasters might not be a big threat to you today, but they could be soon.
• Ransomware is becoming more sophisticated
  There’s an all-out war happening in cyberspace, and when it comes to fortifying your defenses, your business is on its own. Ransomware is a particular threat as it accounted for 81% of financial cyberattacks in 2021. And, while ransomware attacks may not be increasing in volume, they are becoming more sophisticated. You have to be ready to prevent ransomware, but if the worst happens and your systems get locked down, you have to be able to remediate them quickly.
• User error is a persistent problem
  User error has always been the bane of security admins, but it has actually gotten worse. Spurred by COVID-19, it’s estimated that some 36 million workers will be working remotely by 2025. With so many workers scattered about, the challenge of keeping systems secure and data safe is bigger than ever. Are you up to the challenge?

Though DRaaS might not prevent every issue noted above, it’s a critical line of defense if the worst does happen. To sum it up, DRaaS can be a lifesaver for your business. But how do you rationalize the cost?

DRaaS Offers Protection That Pays for Itself

When disaster strikes you can help minimize your risks by having a solid disaster recovery plan in place. Paired with set recovery objectives and the right tools, a DRaaS solution pays for itself by helping you prevent data loss and downtime. According to Gartner, downtime can cost as much as $5600 per minute. That’s a big number, but it might not reflect your business’s unique circumstances. How much would you lose during a downtime event?

In a previous post we offer a general formula for calculating downtime costs, but let’s look at a quick example to show just how expensive one failure event can be. We’ll use simplified, round numbers to illustrate the point, but, of course, the reality is more complex.

• Let’s say on average your company bills $100 per hour.
• You have 10 employees and about 75% of their time is billable to clients.
• This means your business is earning $6,000 for an eight-hour day, or $750 an hour.

Now let’s say your systems are all knocked offline and your staff can’t work for four hours. That adds up to $3,000 lost to downtime. But that’s just the start. Say you lose crucial work your team produced. Now you’re also contending with data loss. Add the cost of four hours of lost work and four hours of lost productivity and your total loss is $6,000. And that’s from a relatively small downtime event. Plus, that doesn’t include any damage to your reputation that may result. If you’re trying to rationalize the cost of DRaaS, know that this event probably could have been avoided with the right solution.

Conclusion

Downtime and data loss is costly for any business. It should be obvious that DRaaS is worth considering for your business, large or small. Think of DRaaS as an insurance policy. Pay a little now to avoid paying a lot later on. All it takes is one failure event.

And, if you’re looking for a solution that keeps all of your bases covered—no matter how severe the failure—consider booking a demo with a StorageCraft sales engineer. They can also help you find the right MSP technology partner to put the solution in place.