Make the Cloud Your Disaster Recovery Site

All organizations, large or small, need an effective business continuity plan to ensure their business keeps running - even in the face of a whole site outage at their primary data center location. SMBs may lack the budget for their own Disaster Recovery site, but they still need a solution that’s just as responsive and resilient as their enterprise brethren. SMBs need to be up and running after a disaster just as rapidly as any enterprise organization. However, the cost and complexity of setting up a Disaster Recovery site is prohibitive for the typical SMB. Let’s consider the key challenges:

• Lack of a Disaster Recovery location. 
  Many SMBs operate from a single location with key IT assets co-located. When their primary site goes down, a typical recovery strategy is to restore from backup tapes. This means the loss of at least one day’s worth of data and significant delays to the full restoration of service.
• Lack of technical expertise. 
  Because most SMBs don’t typically employ dedicated IT staff, they struggle to implement anything beyond daily backup of key systems. For most SMBs, setting up and maintaining redundant infrastructure at a co-location provider with replication and failover infrastructure is simply beyond their technical capabilities.
• Lack of budget to implement Disaster Recovery. 
  A truly responsive approach to business continuity requires hot standby computing infrastructure in-place at the Disaster Recovery site to take over operations at a moments notice. Dedicated WAN links need to be provisioned and maintained between the live and Disaster Recovery sites. Replication and failover infrastructure needs to be purchased, implemented and maintained. While this is often within the financial reach of a large enterprise, the CapEx and OpEx costs put it out of reach for the average SMB.

While these challenges are all valid, they shouldn’t prevent an SMB from developing and implementing an effective business continuity plan. Other models exist that can make every organization resilient in the face of disaster.

How Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service, powered by Neverfail, can help

Managed service providers offer remote compute and storage resources, coupled with WAN connectivity to your site, as a packaged service. These resources provide Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS), when provided by your local managed service provider and powered by Neverfail. A DRaaS solution can provide a cost-effective Disaster Recovery solution for an SMB’s business-critical applications with:

• Industry-leading recovery. Unlike Disaster Recovery solutions powered by backup, Neverfail replicates live application data in real time to the DRaaS service provider’s cloud recovery site. Coupled with Neverfail’s automated failover/failback, this means that you can be back up and running in minutes, with no more than seconds worth of data loss – all at the same price as traditional backup.
• Remote Protection. By definition, a managed service provider operates its cloud data center remotely, far from the primary business location, so any local outages won’t affect their ability to recover your business operations.
• Integration with virtualization. Neverfail works together with your local managed service provider to pre-integrate all the required technology into a Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service solution that is directly plumbed into your data center with minimal effort. It couples tightly with VMware vSphere and VMware Site Recovery Manager to provide integrated physical and virtual management. Thereafter, your service provider manages the Disaster Recovery service remotely with support from Neverfail.
• Subscription-based payment. Forget large CapEx costs. Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service is provided on a monthly subscription basis, typically on a 12-month rolling contract. The economies of scale provided by a cloud-based model mean that the variable costs of compute and storage are provided at industry-leading rates. Cloud service providers are also able to provide resources on a fully elastic basis, so there’s no dedicated infrastructure to fund through the subscription. And since Neverfail includes WAN de-duplication technology, the cost associated with WAN bandwidth is reduced by up to 80 percent.

What to do next

There are a few scenarios to consider:

• I’m looking for a Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service provider to protect my business operations. Several global managed service providers already offer DRaaS powered by Neverfail. So please get in touch with us and we will introduce you to one of our partners who provide this service.
• I’d like to use my existing Managed Service Provider to protect my business. No problem. Please get in touch with Neverfail and introduce us to your current MSP. Our Service Provider Partner Program makes it simple for your current Service Provider to add Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service, powered by Neverfail, to their service portfolio.
• I’m a Managed Service Provider looking to add Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service to my portfolio. Again, no problem. Please take a look at our Service Provider partner program here and get in touch with us. Our partner team can take you through the program and get you started with minimum effort.

Summary

Cloud Service providers are using Neverfail to offer Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service at unprecedented price points and levels of recovery service. SMB customers in particular stand to benefit from the truly disruptive combination of Cloud Computing and Neverfail technologies.