When disaster strikes, seconds matter when it comes to preventing company downtime. According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is $300,000 per hour. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is an innovative, next-generation and cost-saving method of consistently automating and streamlining recovery of critical data and applications, covering each aspect of planning, testing and management.
At FNTS, we are seeing increased demand for DRaaS. With the recent pandemic, clients have expanded disaster recovery planning and overall business continuity to address staffing concerns. Utilizing DRaaS with a managed services provider can expand the client's technical breadth and provide peace of mind that they can continue operations. The adoption of DRaaS also is being driven by the fact that it offloads most of the management and support of the disaster recovery environment to the service provider, which allows a client's IT staff to focus on core business objectives. This approach is popular as more companies are faced with trying to do more with less, in addition to already having a lot of digital transformation and IT initiatives underway.
With the cloud capabilities that exist, DRaaS can be a very affordable solution for companies that previously did not have a robust disaster recovery plan. These organizations can greatly enhance their disaster recovery ability and cost-effectively improve their Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) for downtime and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) for the back-up of important applications and data.
DRaas is also in high demand because it is a proactive defense for ransomware attacks, providing the ability to recover systems and information so they are not held hostage.
FNTS has broadened its existing DRaaS offerings to further incorporate universal cloud environments, including public, private and hybrid cloud. Tailored to fit unique business needs from a self-serve model to a full-service continuum, DRaaS has the following benefits:
- Built-in security services to stay ahead of cyber threats, updates and data compliance regulations.
- Reduction in cost and complexity of recovery capabilities.
- Advanced customization and scalability, including reaching desired RTOs and RPOs.
- Uninterrupted application access.
- Unlimited data storage priced for the actual amount of storage used.
- Support for multiple operating systems and environments, including Windows, Linux, AIX, iSeries and Mainframe.
- Potential insurance premium reductions.
With a fully managed DRaaS solution, a service provider is responsible for setting up the disaster recovery environment, configuring the tools and automation, and performing annual tests to ensure success. FNTS offers its DRaaS cloud solutions with disaster recovery testing at a 100% success rate to ensure full data restoration and replication services for fail-over in the event of natural or human-made disasters.
DRaaS has expanded beyond just preparing for natural disasters into really ensuring client data is protected and recoverable in the event of an outage or loss of access to information. DRaaS will continue to evolve to provide additional automation of recovery exercises, along with providing additional options for leveraging cloud-based alternatives. For clients that are currently operating a secondary data center with hardware dedicated to DR, significant cost savings and improved recovery times are achievable now by shifting to a DRaaS solution.
To learn more, visit fnts.com/disaster-recovery. DRaaS insights from FNTS President Kim Whittaker were also recently published in Tech Target’s: DRaaS guide: Benefits, challenges, providers and market trends.
