How Disaster Recovery Services Can Help When the Worst Happens
Randy Mizzoni, SVP, Sales & Marketing
October 5, 2021
Every technology executive has spent time planning their disaster recovery services.
These are the processes defined in a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) allowing your business to recover and carry on in the event of a disaster.
Of course, disaster strikes in many ways. One look at recent weather around the world shows that fire, floods, and extreme storms can all cause chaos for businesses.
There are many locations with risks as diverse as earthquakes to frequent industrial action disabling public transport. Disaster wears many disguises.
As we have all seen from the past 18 months, pandemic risks are also very real. Not just from the perspective of the health emergency itself, but the inability for employees to visit their office during government-mandated lockdowns.
With all this potential risk to business continuity the value of disaster recovery services is clear. They allow you to quickly recover the critical systems of your organization after any type of disaster and should also facilitate secure remote access – so recovery can begin without the need for people to physically visit your office.
Traditional data recovery is generally quite expensive and time consuming. If you are managing an on-site data center then you will need to find another in a different location and build the communications links to ensure a constant mirror of your main production system is maintained at all times.
Cloud disaster recovery services changes everything. Not only is there no need for upfront capital investment in an additional data center, but also the recovery process will always be smoother and faster. At a fraction of the cost of a traditional mirrored backup location you can use cloud disaster recovery services to switch over to the backup cloud instantly.
Traditional disaster recovery requires a physically mirrored site. This means that the hardware, software, applications, patches and data all need to be mirrored exactly to allow a seamless transfer to the backup system. It is easy to make changes in production that are not reflected in the backup and over months or years, your backup site can be considerably different – not good when your data center is flooded and you need to switch over quickly to the backup site.
Cloud disaster recovery services take a different approach. Usually, you will encapsulate the entire server – the operating system, software, applications, patches, and data – all into a virtual server. This virtual server is backed up to an alternative cloud and can be used almost instantly when needed. The issues around software and hardware differences between the production site and backup are irrelevant in the cloud environment.
There are different strategies you can deploy to make cloud disaster recovery services run as smoothly as possible. Technology journal Computer Weekly recently published a useful guide that compares traditional disaster recovery to cloud disaster recovery services. They concluded that the cloud has many advantages, but the article gives some useful tips on different cloud-based strategies.
Disaster recovery services and BCP have been around longer than most companies have had access to cloud-based services. But as the Computer Weekly comparison shows, modern disaster recovery services allow for immediate recovery This can be critical because the most common disaster is a simple power outage and may only last for an hour. In a traditional environment it may take longer than this to get the backup system ready for recovery to begin. With cloud-based disaster recovery services you can switch seamlessly to the alternative cloud.
How valuable is business continuity to your organization? Know you are protected with WatServ’s fully managed Disaster Recovery as a Service (DraaS) solution.
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.
