Cloud Disaster Recovery Delivers Benefits and Economies

Jason Reid Blogs

Cloud Disaster Recovery

When it comes to protecting your business-critical systems, cloud disaster recovery delivers the best combination of functionality, flexibility, and cost.

How do you define a disaster? A decade ago, when we talked about a disaster we were often referencing floods, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks. All legitimate concerns, but frankly pretty remote for most businesses. Disaster recovery, through its inherent costs and limitations, was restricted in scope to events that had very little chance of affecting the vast majority of businesses. So why bother with it at all?

In 2016, the parameters of disaster recovery have changed. We now talk about ‘macro’ disasters – the traditional fires and floods – and ‘micro’ disasters. A micro disaster could be the loss of your finance system midway through the payroll run. It could be a ransomware attack that encrypts important documents, rendering them unusable. It could be a security patch update that stops an essential application from working. The point is, these are real world problems that face businesses every day, and an effective disaster recovery solution should be able to take them in its stride.

Disaster Recovery Alternatives

If your business relies on the uptime and availability of key IT systems, you have three options when it comes to disaster recovery: –

  • Do Nothing. Even now, many businesses choose to do nothing. Perhaps still in the mindset that the chances of a disaster scenario taking place are remote, businesses assume that the worst will never happen and choose to save money by not implementing disaster recovery provisions.
  • In-House Disaster Recovery. Some businesses elect to implement their own in-house disaster recovery systems. This provides them with control, along with the ability to build systems that deliver functionality and SLAs appropriate to their business. However, in-house disaster recovery systems need to keep pace with production systems, and can be costly in terms of hosting, hardware, licensing, and management overheads.
  • Cloud Disaster Recovery. Cloud disaster recovery services allow businesses to outsource their disaster recovery provisions to specialist third party firms. Cloud disaster recovery has developed to meet the requirements of businesses suffering both macro and micro disasters.

At AssureStor, we believe that cloud disaster recovery delivers benefits and economies above those which in-house provisions can offer.

The Utopia of Cloud Disaster Recovery

AssureStor’s dr2cloud platform has been designed to deliver continuous data protection with recovery in minutes. There are a number of benefits that come with businesses adopting cloud disaster recovery services: –

  • Scalability. Cloud disaster recovery services allow you to pay for the protection you need now, and scale up in the future without needing to invest in additional hardware and licences.
  • Specialism. Providers like AssureStor specialise in cloud disaster recovery services. This allows us to focus on refining our services to ensure that they deliver the best possible recovery times and service levels.
  • Service Focus. AssureStor’s dr2cloud platform is designed and built around customer service, not just technology. Our focus is on removing risk for businesses by delivering robust data protection, and the technology that supports this is carefully selected and tailored to ensure that customers simply experience great service, not bewildering technical challenges.
  • Enterprise Features. Cloud disaster recovery services flatten the landscape between SMBs and enterprise organisations, in terms of functionality and protection. Smaller companies simply couldn’t achieve the service levels provided by the dr2cloud platform through in-house disaster recovery provisions without utterly unrealistic levels of investment.

In Summary

Micro disasters are a reality that all businesses need to address. Doing nothing is a relic of an old way of thinking, and simply isn’t appropriate for businesses in 2016. At AssureStor we believe that cloud disaster recovery delivers tangible benefits over in-house disaster recovery provisions. To find out more about our dr2cloud platform and how it provides effective data protection, please contact us.