Why Backup and Disaster Recovery as a Service Might Be the Best Choice for Your Business

It’s been quite a year, 2020. And it isn’t over yet. What with so many natural disasters, like the busiest hurricane season on record and a massive rise in cyberattacks. In fact, DarkReading says there were more cyberattacks in the first half of 2020 than in all of 2019, including a huge rise in ransomware attacks. If you’re an IT pro and protecting your data isn’t keeping you up at night, you probably already have a solid backup and disaster recovery (DR) solution in place. If you don’t fall into that category read on to learn how Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) may help you sleep soundly.

Downtime Is Expensive

You’ve most likely seen the statistics. Downtime costs a ton. And it’s getting worse. Aberdeen’s recent “Stat of the Week” says the cost of downtime has skyrocketed 60 percent since their report from the previous year when they pegged it at $164,000 per hour of downtime for all businesses, and $215,000 per hour for medium-sized businesses. Wherever your business fits on that spectrum, the stats make it clear that you need to put a solution in place that keeps downtime to a minimum. That’s where DRaaS comes in.

Do-It-Yourself Is Costly

For businesses large and small, building out your data center for disaster recovery can be expensive. Add up all the equipment and software you’ll need, plus the expertise to make sure it works properly, and DRaaS starts to look very attractive. But DRaaS isn’t one size fits all. Look for a DRaaS solution that lets you customize your disaster recovery services to fit both your business needs and your budget.

Finding the Right DRaaS Solution

While you may have both onsite and offsite backups—as we recommend in our update to the traditional 3-2-1 backup rule—cloud-based DRaaS, like StorageCraft Cloud Services, gives you access to your data from anywhere, at any time. The StorageCraft cloud was built specifically for disaster recovery—highly distributed, scalable, and fault-tolerant. So you can count on 99.999 percent uptime, no matter what. While uptime is critical, there are other things to consider, too. Customization is first on the list. Look for a DRaaS solution that fits your needs, whether your IT environment is simple and small, or big and complex. You should be able to control your cloud settings so you can manage your costs and be confident that your budget is predictable, even if disaster does strike.

Flexibility and Control

Flexibility should also be a must-have on your DRaaS list. Your selected solution should centrally manage and monitor all of your cloud accounts through an easy-to-use, self-service online portal. That control should extend to include privacy and security measures that ensure only authorized people can access stored backup images, as well as complete control over networking for seamless failover during a disaster—without third-party intervention. And you should be able to recover everything—from files and folders to machine virtualization to instant failover of an entire site and network.

Advanced Recovery Options

For some companies, it may make sense to consider features that let you run your network in the cloud, just like you’d run it onsite. That makes it possible for you to immediately get back up and running, no matter what happens to your data center. Another option to consider is one-click failover. StorageCraft Cloud Premium Services lets you use Virtual Machine Policy to configure the sequence, order, and timing for each of your mission-critical systems. Even better, it lets you test or start a site-wide failover process with a single button click.

Find the Right Service Level for You

StorageCraft has built out a suite of available cloud service levels that range from secure offsite storage of critical business backups with full-system restore to instant virtualization of your systems and data in the cloud. So there’s likely to be one that’s a good fit for your company. Every service level offering also includes a mirroring option (U.S. only), so your data can be copied and safely stored remotely, in real-time.

Talk To An Engineer         

There’s no better way to get your questions answered and find out if StorageCraft Cloud Services will work for your company than by talking to one of our DRaaS expert engineers. Schedule a live demo today.