INTELLIGENT DATA CENTRES

Disaster recover as a service is an innovative cloud approach to include in business continuity planning explains Mohamad Rizk at Veeam.

Whether it is caused by cataclysmic weather, technological malfunctions or human actions, an IT outage can be devastating. But businesses can be put off extensive disaster recovery plans by the perceived cost and complexity. That leaves many relying on outdated and untested processes, or worse, without any recovery plan in place at all.

Once upon a time, organisations relied on the old ten-mile rule, to work out the appropriate distance to store data backups. But with recent natural disasters impacting whole cities – or even whole countries – such rules are now redundant. In today’ s ever-changing environment, businesses can take advantage of the cloud and Disaster Recovery as a Service, DRaaS to ensure that they are properly protected and always online.

Businesses can suffer from a whole range of issues when an outage strikes. At the lower end of the scale, there is the loss of employee productivity. This cost in itself can soon mount up, with Gartner estimating that firms lose on average US $ 5,600 for each minute of downtime.

But with the rise of digital, businesses are under more pressure than ever to deliver an always on service, as downtime can have serious consequences for their customers. Think back to UK bank TSB’ s three-week outage in April 2018.

Mohamad Rizk, Manager System Engineers, Middle East at Veeam.

Thousands of the bank’ s customers reported issues ranging from fines levied on outstanding payments to accounts being drained by fraudsters.

Now there has been an eightfold increase in consumers leaving the bank, pushing it into a half-year loss, with a figure of £ 176.4 million attributed to the technology meltdown. All in all, the financial and reputational consequences of a disaster can be extensive.

Disaster recovery has often centred on off-site servers, or even tapes, depending on how far back you go. But now, cloud computing offers an excellent alternative to these traditional disaster recovery methods, be it using disaster recovery as a service from a service provider or simply putting backups in the cloud. Moreover, when an outage takes place businesses do not need to wait for on-premise servers to be recovered or incur the delays, and occasionally the risks of having IT teams travel in person to the recovery site.

DRaaS is a valuable cloud-based model. The approach delivers comprehensive disaster recovery by replicating a business’ physical or virtual servers to provide failover. With DRaaS, business-critical applications can be up and running almost instantaneously after an incident.

Like other as a service models, DRaaS offers significant advantages for businesses of a range of sizes. The lower costs open up availability for smaller businesses, who could otherwise have struggled to implement such a service in-house. Equally, its scalability benefits the larger enterprises, whose needs might vary depending on the number of servers, applications and databases being used at any one time.

And whatever the size of the company, IT teams recover valuable time that might otherwise have been dedicated to backups. As a result, DRaaS is an increasingly popular option, with 25 % year on year growth predicted for the offering over the coming decade.

To develop the most appropriate strategy, and to evaluate the role of DRaaS, businesses must consider disaster recovery in the context of their overarching business strategy. The best place to start is with a business impact assessment.

It is important to work out which applications and business processes are most critical to keeping the business available all day, every day. Estimate the maximum amount of downtime the business can stand for each of these business processes before it fails. From

36 Issue 17 INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS