Lisa Dreher, VP Marketing, Logicalis US
Cost-conscious CIOs may balk at the costs involved, but services
that can be adapted as offerings in the cloud make financial and
technical sense. DR-as-a-Service is a perfect
example.Today, tech-savvy CXOs are realising that
the cloud has become an integral part of everyday business
vocabulary. Everybody is worried about the price of disaster
recovery, but what is the price of a business’ downtime? Company
leaders need to take a hard look at numbers they already have on
hand. People have downtime numbers based on holidays when the
company is closed; they know what it means to be shut down for an
entire day, week or more. But they don’t want to look at it because
doing so cost-justifies disaster recovery as a needed expense.
DR-as-a-Service can replace huge capital expenditure (cap-ex) and
personnel costs with more manageable operational expenditure
(op-ex) figures.
DR-as-a-Service is well suited for mid-sized
organisations that don’t have the resources for in-house recovery
management facilities and speaking to our customers, we see that
approximately one-third of middle-market organisations will embrace
the cloud for data recovery within the next couple of years because
moving disaster recovery to the cloud is a smart business move. It
takes a significant infrastructure to correctly administer a
disaster recovery program. However, cloud providers have the IT
equipment, the personnel and the training to provide disaster
recovery as a service to mid-sized clients on a large scale more
cost effectively and with greater precision than many middle-market
organisations can do on their own because they operate on economies
of scale and shared-resources.
For these organisations disaster recovery as a
service is a strong alternative to a premises-based business
continuity/disaster recovery plan. Here are the top six reasons we
believe CIOs should put DR-as-a-Service on their radars for early
adoption in 2012.
- Minimising Costs: Disaster
recovery plans are expensive. To do it right, there’s just no
getting around the duplication of assets. When a technology refresh
is called for, businesses are caught in the financial trap of
refreshing both sites as well as spending untold man-hours and
intellectual knowledge just on the process of creating synergies
between the two sites. Essentially, it’s like running two data
centres rather than one. On the flip side, with DR-as-a-Service,
all of the disaster recovery planning work, all the technology
refreshes, all the man hours needed to make things sync are all
costs that are covered by the service provider. The business
customer pays a fixed monthly op-ex cost that can be expected to
remain fairly constant for three to ten years even with two or
three technology refreshes thrown into the mix.
- Maximising Knowledge:
Companies that take on the chore of disaster recovery in house have
to become experts in DR as well as everything else they are doing
on an IT basis. They are continually investing and reinvesting in
that knowledge base, and often, that expertise is held by just one
or two key people in the tech department. What if those in-house
experts leave? With DR-as-a-Service, the entire service provider’s
organisation is dedicated to building expertise in disaster
recovery. They see new ways to offer recovery based on what they
are doing with other clients and can bring those to a CIO’s
attention. If a client’s IT manager wants to try something new, it
is incumbent upon the service provider to do the research and
development of that plan, leaving the client free to use its IT
resources in ways that create more tangible value for the
company.
- Faster Access to Experts:
Economies of scale are a clear advantage in just about every area
of business. This holds true when a customer needs to talk with the
technical experts at an OEM. While a single business may have
purchased a substantial amount of equipment from a vendor, it’s
unlikely that they have as deep of a relationship with that vendor
as the cloud service provider has, given their volume of purchases
and ongoing support contracts. So, when every second counts and a
business’ systems are down, CIOs will be thankful they have direct
and immediate access to the wealth of knowledge and highest level
of certified professionals on their cloud provider’s staff – who
also have immediate-call relationships with individual technology
vendors – rather than the client CIO trying to call any vendor
themselves and working from the bottom up.
- Management & Monitoring:
In today’s world, fast recovery point and time objectives are more
the norm than the exception. Few companies have the luxury of
waiting for tapes to be shipped to their facility in the event of a
true disaster. Even the most prepared IT managers today often hear
about downtime from customers; they didn’t know a failure was
imminent and their DR systems may not have been live and at the
ready. Service providers offering DR-as-a-Service, however, live
and breathe disaster recovery; as a result, they have the most
sophisticated systems possible to monitor their clients’ data
centres, alert them to impending failures, and manage the recovery
process faster and more smoothly than most in-house IT departments
can react. Since providers already have these management and
monitoring tools in place, and those tools can be extended to their
clients, it makes good business sense to take advantage of that and
use their dashboards, reports and measurable metrics to oversee the
health of the company’s primary data centre.
- Failback: This is the one no
one thinks about. Imagine a disaster occurred. The company has a DR
facility, the plan worked, and the company is back up and running.
Now what? How does the company transition back to its primary data
centre without disrupting operations? Even the most experienced
CIOs struggle with this question. If the company’s DR facility is
an older or secondary data centre that is not as well equipped as
the primary, the IT department is now in a time-crunch, trying to
determine how to failback before a new event takes place. But with
DR-as-a-Service, the cloud provider has significant infrastructure
and resources since those resources are shared among many users;
they have stringent standards in place that give CIOs the luxury of
planning a failback strategy over time that makes sense with the
added benefit of the deep knowledge of the cloud provider’s
engineering staff at their disposal.
- Job Security: According to
research by the U.S. Bureau of Labor, 93 % of companies that suffer
a significant data loss go out of business within five years. Who
wants to be responsible for that? There is a lot of risk involved
for CIOs who implement their own disaster recovery plans in house.
There is the obvious cost of acquiring redundant systems. The time
and personnel cost to manage what amounts to two data centres. The
question of how to handle DR when a primary data centre is
refreshed. And the “what if” fears that keep IT pros up and night,
wondering and hoping the strategy they have in place is fail safe
in the event of a catastrophic system failure. With
DR-as-a-Service, the responsibility is largely shifted to the
service provider, and with clearly defined SLAs, CIOs and IT
managers gain a measure of comfort and job security that, before
DR-as-a-Service, was unimaginable.
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