INSIGHT
“Incredibly, many organisations are still reluctant or even afraid
to test their DR plans” Johnny Carpenter, Director of Sales EMEA, iland
Adding Value to DRaaS
The prospect of an IT outage is one of the key issues that keeps IT professionals awake at night which is just
one of the reasons that Johnny Carpenter, Director of Sales EMEA, iland, is a fervent proponent of Disaster
Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS). Here Carpenter explains why
In the past two years, 93%
of organisations have
experienced tech-related
business disruption and, as
a result, 1 out of 5 experienced
major reputational damage and
permanent loss of customers.
Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service
(DRaaS) is a mainstream use
of the cloud that helps protect
against outages through an
infrastructure and strategy that
deals with worst-case scenarios.
Carpenter says the bene ts of
cloud DRaaS over on-premise
disaster recovery are welldocumented.
“Companies don’t have to
double their infrastructure
investments and run parallel
systems as a backup. DRaaS also
o ers better protection against
threats such as natural disasters
because there’s no physical
infrastructure to protect and it
is easily scalable to grow with
businesses.
When choosing a CSP for
DRaaS, you trust them to protect
your business during the worst
possible scenario. So, you need
to be clear on the capabilities
and the SLAs they will deliver.
is includes weighing costs as
part of your budget planning
and reviewing regulatory and
compliance factors.
With cloud services you pay
only for what you consume,
which is undeniably preferable
to paying for on-premise
systems that may never be used.
Nevertheless, CSP pricing
models can be complex, making
it important to know the cost
implications should you need to
fully failover your production
environment to the cloud.
Your CSP should size the user
environment accurately (at iland
we use a tool called Catalyst to
do this) for su cient storage
and resources to avoid any nasty
surprises in the event of a failover.
is also ensures straightforward
and transparent pricing.
In a disaster scenario, IT
teams will be stretched and
under pressure. It helps if the
DR environment chosen is
based on familiar structures
and terminology. For example,
many IT administrators are
familiar with a VMware-based
cloud product that uses the same
toolsets and terminology, which
reduces the learning curve to
respond faster during a disaster.
It’s also important to know
Johnny Carpenter,
Director of Sales
EMEA
how much of your DR set-up
will be a DIY exercise and how
much support you can expect
from your CSP. Will it be a
concierge onboarding service,
or do you need to scope extra
internal resources or additional
consultancy to manage set-up?
Look at the support level the CSP
commits to provide. Could you
ask them to press the failover
button if they had to? Will they
assist with failing back when the
time comes?
Management is another
critical factor. One of the
bene ts of cloud DRaaS is that
in-house teams don’t have a
second on-premise environment
to manage. e environment is
replicated without adding to the
team’s administrative burden.
However, visibility into the DR
environment is essential and
needs to be simple.
Finally, you need assurance
that your backup environment
is compliant with industry
regulations to prevent data
vulnerabilities that can
compromise your customers
and your business. Whatever
requirements your business has
to meet – HIPAA, GDPR etc –
your DRaaS provider needs to
guarantee compliance as well.”
Testing DR Plans
Carpenters says that DRaaS
solutions should provide facilities
to test DR plans without
impacting the production
environment.
“Incredibly, many
organisations are still reluctant or
even afraid to test their DR plans.
With cloud DRaaS, teams
can run recovery tests in replica
environments in a short time,
generating a full report to detail
the performance of every part
of the DR plan and recovery
orchestration. is gives full
visibility into whether or not a
business can come back online
during a disaster and the order in
which applications will recover.
Testing in this manner is much
more e ective than annual
testing of on-premise systems.”
ED SAYS…
Beyond its primary purpose of disaster recovery, businesses can double down on
their DRaaS investment with a replica virtual environment to support on-demand
security testing, system upgrades, patch testing and user acceptance testing
without disrupting their production environments.
54 | Comms Business Magazine | August 2019 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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