The New IT Imperative: Disaster Recovery On-Demand

Justin Blake, Solutions Architect, CoreSite

Even the best-laid plans can go awry, the saying goes. Disaster can strike a business without warning and while business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) planning isn’t new, many of the threats facing businesses and the way they respond to them are.

Cybersecurity threats like ransomware and DDoS attacks are more frequent, complex, and damaging than ever, having increased by more than 40% in the last two years and cause an average of over 16 days of downtime. Meanwhile, conventional risks from natural disasters, network failure, or widespread power outages are also pervasive, impacting over 95% of enterprises and costing them up to $400,000 per hour of downtime.

As business operations threats continue to evolve, leaders around the world and in every industry are beginning to rethink their approach to disaster recovery. They’re recognizing that the traditional do-it-yourself DR is time-consuming, costly, and most importantly, ineffective. Instead, many are turning to outsourced options — Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to secure and protect their operations from harm and increase the velocity of getting back to business as usual when an interruption does occur.

A new DR strategy for a new time

The widespread adoption of colocation and cloud services means there are now more networks to configure, more endpoints to secure, and more mission-critical apps to support than ever. Yet, organizations must also contend with a cloud and cybersecurity skills gap that continues to widen each year.

Like software, infrastructure, and data solutions that have transitioned to a service model, DRaaS helps enterprises bolster their DR strategies while mostly avoiding the skills gap. DRaaS unburdens enterprise IT teams of day-to-day disaster recovery responsibilities, offering off-site DR capability that helps businesses avoid:

• Costly 1:1 infrastructure duplication at secondary or multiple sites
• Staffing additional facilities with highly qualified and expensive personnel
• Unmanaged and untested failover of network, compute and storage devices
  

But choosing a DRaaS provider isn’t something to take lightly. Both enterprise business and IT leaders should consult with various teams and departments in their organization to understand system and software contingencies and to set clear, measurable standards of recovery. It’s also the right time to thoroughly evaluate a range of provider options, prioritizing those with the right people and facilities in place — especially their data centers.

Cloud services have revolutionized the way today’s businesses operate. They leverage powerful computing environments and nearly limitless storage capacity to tackle everything from artificial intelligence for autonomous vehicles to storing vital patient health information.

The vital role of the data center in DRaaS

Data centers play a pivotal role in any disaster recovery strategy, but are the heart of a DRaaS solution. For starters, data centers provide physical security such as man-traps, locking gates, and biometric scanners that make it extremely difficult for unauthorized personnel to access a business’s environment and cause any physical damage or interruption, either willfully or by accident.

More importantly, they also add layers of defense against potentially catastrophic information and data loss by offering organizations the ability to directly connect to cloud service vendors, managed services providers and even other data centers while avoiding having to rely on public Internet — all within the confines of the data center walls.

Modern, hyper-connected data centers feature direct cloud and private network connectivity that enable enterprises to scale and diversify their infrastructure for greater resilience and redundancy. For example, data centers spread across a number of strategic markets gives companies more options for where to house their core infrastructure based on their business priorities  — namely being physically closer to the largest number of customers and lower latency connections to cloud services providers for superior customer experiences— and use sites in other regions as secondary facilities.

Now, enterprises that prefer the low latency and density of coastal data center hubs such as Los Angeles or New York can use facilities in those locations for their mission-critical on-prem systems and house other applications or services in secondary and tertiary sites elsewhere, connected by a dedicated, secure network.

At the same time, enterprises can take advantage of simple fiber cross-connects to hundreds of cloud and network services providers that vary by location to dramatically expand their cloud footprints. These connections also make it easier to directly connect with leading DRaaS providers who have sophisticated recovery service platforms, evaluation software, and extensive experience with writing procedures, scheduling failover tests, and conducting Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives that many IT teams either can’t or simply don’t have the time to manage themselves.

A little outside help never hurt

Cloud services have revolutionized the way today’s businesses operate. They leverage powerful computing environments and nearly limitless storage capacity to tackle everything from artificial intelligence for autonomous vehicles to storing vital patient health information.

However, they’ve also added more complexity to an organization’s infrastructure and increased the risk of costly downtime from a host of possible causes beyond the scope and scale of what most IT teams can handle. No matter the industry or service, businesses need a strategic, agile, and comprehensive plan for reacting to business threats ranging from network crashes and power outages to ransomware attacks and natural disasters that can cripple a business to a point of closing its doors for good.

Disaster Recovery as a Service is quickly gaining an audience among business and enterprise IT leaders as an efficient, cost-effective, and reliable way of protecting their operations from both imminent and unforeseen existential threats.