Cloud: The DR Game Changer

Everyone knows that having a solid disaster recovery plan is good business practice. 

MarketsandMarkets recently predicted that "The global DRaaS and cloud based business continuity is forecasted to grow from $640.8 million in 2013 to $5.77 billion by 2018".  Cloud innovations have changed the DR game and made it possible for companies of every size to have a dependable DR solution. 

Below I explain the predicted growth of cloud DR and how it can help you.

Disasters Happen

 

• ·24% of companies said they experienced a full data disaster (Forrester)
• ·10% of small business disasters are man-made (NFIB National Small Business Poll)
• ·30% of all small businesses in the USA have been impacted by natural disasters (NFIB National Small Business Poll)
• ·95% of companies experienced a data outage in the past year (Ponemon Institute)
• ·Average midsized company has 16-20 hours of network, system, or application downtime per year (Gartner)
• ·Average cost of downtime for a midsize company is $70,000 per hour (Gartner) though International Data Corp and Strategic Research put the estimates at $84,000 and $90,000 respectively
• ·Survival rate for companies without a disaster recovery plan is less than 10% (Touché Ross study)

Why are most of the studies about SMBs?

 

Many of the difficulties around having a comprehensive disaster recovery plan center around its cost and complexity.  Usually large enterprises have the funds to not only pay for the solution needed to prevent a disaster from running their business, but also to pay for the expertise to implement, test, and maintain the DR infrastructure.  These are luxuries most SMBs don’t have. 

The problem, a look at a typical SMB disaster recovery 

plan.

 

Forrester says that 50% of SMBs that do have a DR plan are unable to test it.  Typically smaller businesses just do the best they can with an affordable solution.  They back up to tape (usually the same tapes they have been using for the last 5-10 years) and hope that in a disaster they can quickly recreate the environment.   

Often testing this plan would require the organization to bring the servers offline, causing downtime.  If the recovery is unsuccessful then an organization is now in a live man-made DR scenario so testing usually doesn’t occur.  Backing up your critical infrastructure is good business practice but it isn’t a DR Plan.

According to the Veeam Data Protection Report 2013 there are too many issues with backup and recovery plans to depend on them for a disaster.

• ·84% of CIOs stated they are experiencing complexity related issues with backup and recovery of virtual environments
• ·23% experienced difficulty backing up to tape
• ·45% of CIOs stated that backup takes too long
• ·38% stated recovery takes too long
• ·28% stated restores fail too often

What are SMBs to do with the looming threat of a disaster?

 

Gartner estimates that only 35% of SMBs have a comprehensive disaster recovery plan in place.  This is where the cloud comes in.  New innovations in cloud computing and virtualization make it possible for any size organization to afford a comprehensive disaster recovery plan.  Instead of having to invest in new infrastructure and additional personnel to fail-over  There are a few options out there but one I’m most familiar with is DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) offered by Windstream Hosted Solutions.  This service in particular offers a RTO of less than 4 hours for a site wide outage and annual testing of your DRaaS environment.
in the event of a disaster, you can now virtualize your production environment and replicate it to the cloud with near real time information.

There are other providers offering similar solutions like Latasys’ DRaaS solution and Peak10’s On-demand Disaster Recovery.  The point is there are options and you should look at all of your options and determine which solution meet’s your business needs.  It is often hard to know where to start with building a disaster recovery plan and working with a services provider can help give you direction for outlining your  plan.