2020 Was the Year of Disaster Recovery

COVID-19

During the pandemic, every organization was forced to re-examine how and where their employees work. This led to many businesses greatly increasing their digital operations so that employees could have the opportunity to work from home. Because of this sudden and unexpected shift, keeping internal systems and applications running 24/7 suddenly became essential in order to maintain business continuity. Companies that weren’t able to surmount these hurdles quickly became business casualties of COVID-19.

Historic Weather and Climate Disasters

According to the National Centers for Environmental information (NCEI), 2020 was a historic year of extremes in the United States. There were 22 separate climate events which, on their own, resulted in billions of dollars’ worth of damage to infrastructure, marking a harrowing record for the agency. 7 disasters linked to cyclones, 13 to severe storms, 1 to drought, and 1 to wildfire. Each one of these events recorded in excess of a billion dollars in damage to vital infrastructure, including data centers and the underlying hardware which supports them. If these trends continue, DRaaS solutions will be more vital than ever before.

Cognizant Ransomware Incident

The largest ransomware attack of 2020 was on technology giant Cognizant. All said and done, it cost the company an astronomical $70 million in both revenue loss and recovery and mitigation efforts. In April, the organization’s network was infected with Maze ransomware. This completely blocked their entire work from home capabilities and encrypted their servers. It took three weeks for them to recover and restore their services. However, they continued to incur legal and consulting costs as they investigated the attack, in addition to all restoration and remediation efforts.

In the past, some companies viewed disaster recovery as an insurance policy that they would never use. 2020 showed us that it must be looked at as something much more than that.

What is DRaaS?

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is a cloud based solution that providers offer to ensure data protection, limit downtime, and shorten recovery of data when a disaster occurs. Most providers offer DRaaS on either a contractual basis or pay as you go model. Having a contract up front is beneficial as it lays out a providers SLA’s and lets you know exactly how the services will be deployed. On the other hand, the pay as you go model allows you to reduce costs as your payments will be based on a combination of storage, bandwidth, RAM, and compute costs among other things. The less you use, the less you pay.

How Does it Work?

Cloud computing is the engine that propels DRaaS by allowing for the hosting of virtual or physical servers, which are used to provide failovers for an organizations data. There are 3 primary steps are involved in any disaster recovery solution: Replication, failover, and failback.

Replication

Replication involves taking data that’s housed on a client’s primary network, duplicating it, and sending it to the client’s DRaaS provider who then hosts the environment remotely. Replication is utilized for both physical and virtual servers since most organizations utilizes infrastructure which is a hybrid of both. Replication is a continuous process. As data is added or changed, it is essential for a disaster recovery solution to allow for regular data “snapshots”, so that no new data is lost in the event of an unforeseen emergency event.

Failover

This is where a clients’ access is moved to a secondary site hosted by the disaster recovery provider. In the event of a catastrophe, this allows the provider to quickly spin up data and instances. Speed is king when it comes to DRaaS solutions. Any downtime can throw a wrench in business-critical tasks, costing organizations time and money.

Failback

This is where data moves from the disaster recovery provider back to the clients primary site. It’s important to begin the replication process as soon as failback is complete in order to ensure continuous protection.

Where Can You Get DRaaS Solutions?

As with most purchases, before making a final decision you want to make sure to browse as many options as possible in order to find the solution that fits your organizations unique needs. Below is a brief summary of several providers who have decades of experience offering DRaaS solutions to enterprise businesses.

Aptum Technologies

Aptum offers custom disaster recovery solutions that minimize business impact and ensure service levels are maintained. They take the time to create a custom disaster recovery runbook specific to your IT environment. What distinguishes them from other IT providers is their depth of expertise, quality of support, and service focused attention to detail.

Equinix

Operating in 50+ markets across 5 continents, Equinix is no stranger to enterprise scale solutions. This includes their disaster recovery solution which assists clients with creating a comprehensive risk management strategy in order to maximize business continuity on the face of an emergency. Their long history of market leadership make them an appealing option for organizations looking to modernize their disaster recovery approach.

INAP

INAP is a global provider of performance driven IT offerings specializing in hybrid infrastructure solutions. Their combination of experience and expertise in hybrid environments make them a logical choice for businesses of any size. Powered by Veam and Zerto, INAP’s DRaaS solution is flexible enough to meet a wide array of recovery objectives and budgets without sacrificing anything essential.

UnitedLayer

With more than 18 years of experience and a pool of experts in leading technologies, UnitedLayer enables enterprises, SMB’s, government agencies, and start-ups to reap the maximum benefits of their multicloud investments. Their disaster recovery solution helps clients anticipate, prepare, and mitigate emergencies with a highly customizable, fully managed and secure solution. Their DRaaS offering comes with proprietary industry leading security technology to keep you valuable data safe and secure no matter what.