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Disaster Recovery As A Service: What You Need To Know




No business ever hopes for a disaster, but that doesn't mean you shouldn’t anticipate one. In today’s world, downtime and disasters can strike at any time and have serious repercussions.

A recent study by Touche Ross found that less than 10% of companies survive a major disaster if they don’t have a disaster recovery plan in place, yet 75% of all small businesses don’t have a continuity plan in place. One of the great challenges with catastrophic events is that they can come from any number of sources, so business owners have to make sure that they’re prepared for all types of disasters. And, even if measures are put into place, they don’t always work.

For example, ransomware can bypass 94% of antivirus software solutions, and the results can be staggering. CNN reported that the average cost incurred per ransomware incident is more than $100,000 when downtime and recovery costs are factored in.

Disaster can strike more innocently as well; human error, in fact, is the primary cause of security and data breaches, and comprises 52% of all these disasters. But there are other common culprits as well, such as weather events, acts of terror and software failure.

For small business owners, knowing the importance of averting disaster means taking the steps to put a disaster recovery plan in place.

The Danger of Downtime

On average, downtime costs a small company $8,000 an hour and for a medium-size company, that hourly rate hikes to $74,000. For a large enterprise, that same hour of downtime costs a staggering $700,000.

The recovery time is slow and painful as well. The average amount of time it takes for a business to recover is 18.5 hours; and, as previously noted, many businesses won’t recover at all.

Preparation is truly the only way to avert disasters and ensure that business operations can continue. Protecting your business begins with understanding its vulnerabilities and safeguarding against the risks you face. By preparing for the worst-case scenario, you can avoid business disruption.

A business continuity plan, or disaster recovery plan, allows you to protect your business and your data — and make sure that your systems are available and reliable, no matter what disasters you encounter. Disaster recovery as a service, or DRaaS, allows for the implementation of such plans and provides total system backup to allow business to continue, uninterrupted, in the event of system failure.

Understanding DRaaS

Disaster recovery as a service uses cloud resources as a backup to avoid the business disruptions caused by a disaster. It replicates and backs up all of your cloud data, essentially creating a secondary infrastructure for storing all of your information.

In the event of a disaster, it becomes the primary environment for operations while the main system is being repaired. These applications can also be run on virtual machines at any given time, regardless of whether or not there’s a disaster. That means the information is always accessible. This configuration can also be used as a workable gateway to test cloud computing and to replicate any system that is housed in the main on-premise environment.

DRaaS offers a number of benefits beyond the obvious advantage of securing your business data in the event of a disaster. Its cloud-based nature ensures continuous backup and instant availability, so in the event that a physical site becomes temporarily unavailable, there’s no lag time in accessing that information from the cloud.

Because of its array agnostic nature, DRaaS is also able to replicate any platform. DRaaS works with different systems, allowing you to protect servers across different hypervisors and replicate data from different storage devices.

And, since all data is not created equal, you have the flexibility of selecting what needs to be backed up and what information does not need to be saved. This allows you to lower your costs by determining what data will be included in the backup.

When (and Why) You Need DRaaS

The need for DRaaS becomes more and more evident as weather conditions become more volatile and unpredictable, hackers and ransomware continue proliferating and human error remains an inevitability. Businesses who don’t have a disaster recovery plan are quite literally betting the house. And, if disaster strikes, there’s little chance of winning that bet.

DRaaS is truly an investment that saves you money. It allows you to instantly have a plan that covers all your business assets and limits your vulnerability. At Aventis Systems, we offer a well-documented service that is hosted in our own private cloud. Not only can we make disaster recovery planning easier by handling all the specifics and planning, but it also is much more affordable than leasing space for backup sites, which will require you to pay for power, cooling and security.

As you allow third-party experts to handle your disaster recovery plan, you’re also freeing up your IT team to work on their day-to-day concerns. And you can do that with the confidence that your data is being secured by a team who has done this many times before and knows exactly what needs to be done.

If you want to know that your business data is secure, DRaaS is the ultimate security blanket. With all of your important data secure in the cloud, you can weather any storm, whether it’s man-made, an act of nature or something else.

Let Aventis Systems show you just how simple it is to achieve this peace of mind. Our experts can implement DRaaS efficiently and seamlessly, giving your business the protection it needs and deserves. Call us today at 1-800-AVENTIS to discuss how we can be of service to you.