How Disaster Recovery as a Service Can Dramatically Improve Your DR and BCP
WatServ
February 2, 2022
Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) are acronyms that have become familiar to many executives throughout the Covid pandemic. BCP is a set of principles and plans that allow a business to continue operating, even in the middle of a crisis. DR is the set of policies and procedures that enable a business to recover from a business catastrophe.
Naturally, the type of disaster can vary. It might be a pandemic that prevents all your employees from visiting the office. It might be an earthquake, or a violent storm that knocks out critical power lines. It might be a problem with your local public transportation system, or it might be a fire in your data center.
Whether the problem is a natural disaster or manmade, you always need an immediate plan for the continuation of business and a set of steps that can allow you to resolve the issue – to return to a business state that is close to normal.
But disaster recovery can be an exceedingly difficult process. What if you have a mix of on premises and cloud assets and your technology estate includes applications, storage, data, and networking? If the disaster includes a lack of access to your network, servers, or storage then it can be extremely damaging for your business. What if you have the backup, but your IT team cannot access or control it?
Cybercrime is adding an even more urgent reason to think carefully about where and how your data can be managed and recovered in a crisis. Technology analysts are now talking about ransomware companies running their operation like a business – the ransom demands are just seen as cashflow! If all your data were suddenly encrypted by cybercriminals, then would you be able to recover everything without having to pay a ransom?
There are many other real-world examples of different types of disaster that can prevent your business trading normally, such as:
- Distributed-Denial-of-Service:
- Total destruction: the complete loss of your data center in an earthquake or hurricane… do you have a complete real-time replicated off-site backup?
- Sabotage: this kind of malicious damage often takes some time to be noticed so if your backup can only go back 24 hours, but a disgruntled employee has been damaging the data for a week before discovery then you have a real problem.
Building a comprehensive Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity ( plans includes the consideration of an offsite backup, but then there is the requirement to manage the backup process – both in normal times and when a crisis occurs.
This is where a fully managed service, such as the WatServ DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) concept can help. Not only can a managed service provider ensure that you don’t need to worry about your backup processes on a day-to-day basis, but you can feel assured that if there is ever a business continuity crisis then you have an expert partner restoring your systems.
Managing an effective and comprehensive backup as frequent as required across on-premises and cloud-based systems are more complex than ever, but managed solutions are making it easier than ever to achieve an extremely high level of protection.
For more information on how DRaaS works check out WatServ’s Disaster Recovery as a Service on Azure.
About
WatServ is an IT solutions provider that helps organizations digitally transform through cloud technologies and managed services.
Serving clients as a trusted advisor since 2006, WatServ provides experience-tested, strategic solutions across all stages of the digital transformation journey. Clients choose WatServ to migrate infrastructure and applications to the cloud, secure critical data, implement disaster recovery, deploy virtual desktop, enable data-readiness for productivity solutions and manage IT environments.
Our clients span a broad range of industries, and we’re a global supplier of IT services for many Brookfield Portfolio Companies. To help our mid-size clients, we provide scalable offerings that simplify cloud adoption and drive business optimization. For enterprise clients, we co-create cloud solutions that enable stability and efficiency for complex IT tools and processes.
With more than 15 years of experience, WatServ has a track record of delivering quantifiable business results and a superior client experience. Ranked as one of Canada’s Top 100 Solution Providers for the last three years in a row, WatServ is always on.
