Disaster recovery solutions help organizations protect their data and critical systems. They can help them avoid loss of revenue and reputation, as well as improve employee morale. Moreover, they can also reduce IT costs.
Solutions Review has compiled a list of top Disaster Recovery as a Service companies. These vendors offer flexible options for managing backups, recovery testing, and failover.
Preventive measures
A disaster recovery solution enables businesses to restore lost data and computer processing from an offsite location that is not affected by the disaster. This allows the business to continue operations, and may prevent loss of revenue or reputation damage. Having a DR plan can help reduce the risk of data loss, IT downtime and out-of-budget expenses.
A DR solution can be as simple as a backup or a DR-as-a-service provider. The latter provides remote data backups and can be offered on a regular basis. These solutions can save money by reducing storage costs and minimizing bandwidth required for backup windows.
A modern DR solution leverages the cloud to reduce upfront costs and improve RPO and RTO. One such solution is Zerto, which combines storage and backup as well as orchestration and automation on a single platform. It can protect multi-TB SQL, Exchange and Oracle VMs, and transfer workloads between public, private, and hybrid clouds.
Recovery time objective
A recovery time objective (RTO) is a critical metric that helps determine the frequency of backups and the acceptable amount of data loss in the event of an outage. It is part of a business impact analysis (BIA) and plays a crucial role in the development of backup and disaster recovery strategies.
Choosing the right RTO and RPO depends on your business needs, but there are several options to consider. Disaster recovery solutions can help you meet your RTO by creating redundancies and minimizing downtime through continuous replication. Some solutions, such as Barracuda, offer faster restore times through local storage and secure offsite copies.
Choosing the right disaster recovery solution also means considering human resources. Your employees need access to support and communication even when their normal workplaces are closed. This is why it’s important to plan for people as well as technology. This will help you minimize the impact of a disaster on your organization and ensure that you can get back up and running quickly.
Recovery point objective
One of the key elements to a successful Disaster Recovery plan is setting a recovery point objective. This defines the maximum amount of time a business can tolerate losing data in case of a disaster. This figure is based on factors such as loss of billable hours, lost sales from online activity and regulatory compliance obligations.
Having a clear RPO helps reassure clients, prospective customers and investors that your company is doing everything it can to protect their information. It is also important to set RTOs, or recovery time objectives, which are the time it takes to get your system back up and running after a disruption.
To minimize the impact of a disaster, businesses can use a cloud-based disaster recovery service like CenturyLink. It offers a flexible, scalable and cost-effective option for protecting critical workloads. It supports VMware and Hyper-V virtual environments and provides rapid recoveries from any point in time. In addition, it offers a low RPO of less than two hours.
Testing
A disaster recovery plan needs to be tested regularly to ensure it is up-to-date and can be executed in the event of a failure. This process involves simulating a disaster scenario and assessing the effectiveness of your backup-and-recovery processes. It also helps identify potential weaknesses in your plan and reduces the impact of downtime on your business.
The frequency of testing your DR plan depends on the type and complexity of your IT environment. However, many experts recommend testing your DR plans once every quarter or twice per year. Testing is important because it allows you to spot potential issues in your system before they become critical during a real-world disaster.
A popular tool for DR testing is Axcient’s X360Recover. It’s an MSP-focused solution that simplifies DR planning and execution through DR sync, continuous data protection, and system snapshot-based data backup. The software offers non-disruptive DR strategy tests and is compatible with multiple systems and devices.