How’s your Disaster Recovery plan looking?
During the mayhem of the past few weeks, you may well have implemented your business continuity strategy and in some cases your IT Disaster Recovery (DR) plans. If you haven’t, you’ve no doubt been thinking about how prepared you are if something impacts the core elements of your IT infrastructure. So, whilst you and your teams are working remotely how do you maintain productivity and uptime for these business-critical services and applications that are more important than ever to your business? If you are unable to get to your infrastructure, how sure are you that you would be able to cope if disaster were to strike such as remote workers accidentally introducing a l security breach which in turn introduces ransomware?
Now you’ve got everyone working at home and you are running with your business continuity plan, its best to look back and ask, what could have gone better and what didn’t work when you implemented the plan. If you had to do it again, what would you do differently? If you had a major incident which affected your business applications, infrastructure and services, how much downtime could be tolerated? How much impact would an outage or disruption have on the bottom line? ideally, where would you want your business essential data, applications and services – isolated in an on-site data center, with your access restricted by the nationwide lockdown, or do you want it residing seamlessly in the Cloud?
There has never been a better or more meaningful time to refine your DR strategy as part of the wider business continuity plan; to ensure your network will keep running, even when you can’t physically ‘flick the switch’ to get you into recovery mode. Now is the time to consider how cloud-based services may help to reduce costs and remove complexity headaches and operational concerns you may have. One that could have you back up and functioning at full speed with as few as four quick clicks…and one which nontechnical staff may be able to invoke (if authorized of course).
The new status quo
Even with what may seem like a watertight DR strategy in place, you’re potentially still open to risks. You know that. But what if the current state of mass remote working is here to stay? With a DR strategy in place you have already taken strides to protect your business, but you need to ensure you are able to protect it to the best level possible. Because it looks likely that your teams are going to be working remotely for a while yet, prioritising the security and resilience of your services and data is of paramount importance, strategies cannot just sit gathering dust they need to be checked they work and futureproofed.
But where does your new risk reside? We all know that increased inter connectivity means increased vulnerabilities, but have you identified all the potential threats to your network and the devices in it? How are you managing the increased ransomware risk? And more importantly what to do if you have a breach, how do you recover quickly as possible? Have you moved some or all your core applications and data to the Cloud? You need to think about covering all corners of your network to ensure you can recover everything as seamlessly and easily as possible to ensure the business remains operational, whilst allowing IT to be innovative without juggling the added complexity of enabling the business to operate at the same time.
The advantage of M247’s Cloud DRaaS powered by Zerto is that you can replicate your production site to multiple locations, giving you increased peace of mind. More than that, with scalable solutions for businesses of all sizes, we can restore service within minutes rather than hours.
What about Public Cloud?
Increased global demand has got many of the public cloud providers operating at the very limits of their capacity, and while they are dynamically adapting to this influx with extra capacity to accommodate the global surge in remote working, their prices will have gone up too. What this means for you is that choosing who to provision your cloud services needs to consider not only scalability and flexibility but cost too.
Equally what you find is that whilst the costs look very competitive, once the data resides in public cloud the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) can be significantly higher for certain workloads.
What this means for you is that choosing a cloud to provision your services is not going to deliver the cost, scalability and flexibility you expected. But how do you move your data to the appropriate platform for the application and data workload characteristics?
Cloud-appropriate solutions for all budgets
The Cloud question has never been about cloud first. No organization should be leaping feet first into the Cloud just because it looks like everybody else is. The best solution for any business is going to be a cloud-appropriate one. This means looking at your data, analyzing your numbers and determining where each element of your infrastructure works best. Not everything will be suitable for public cloud, and your decision does not have to be an all-or-nothing one. Hybrid cloud solutions have never been more prevalent or relevant, and here at M247, we’re dedicated to helping you find the right solution for your business.
In November 2019, we completed the development of our next generation cloud platform, launching 247Cloud to offer scalability solutions to all our customers, no matter their size or location.
247Cloud™ and our DRaaS solution not only protects our customers’ data, it allows for the fluid movement of data and applications between your environment and multiple cloud platforms. We can help you to understand and identify the best fit for your applications and data, commercial viability and helping your business to use the Cloud dynamically. Enabling you to quickly and dynamically enhanced your business continuity strategy with leading IT resilience.
Here to help
We understand the challenges of the current global environment, and we’re here to help. With over 20 years’ experience in data center environments, an enviable global network reach and a team of experts at your disposal. We’re the perfect choice of partner to ensure your most important business assets are protected and secure. All our customer focused solutions come with an unbeatable package of support and a team of experts to address your business challenges, whenever and wherever you need it.
With our DRaaS solution, you will get protection against ransomware, full system and application replication, workload recovery and backup, managed firewalls and resilient connectivity. We will focus on improving your RTO and RPOs to make sure you’re back up and running as fast as possible, at the speeds your business relies on, with minimal business disruption and loss of revenue.
What’s more, if you sign up with us before 30 June, you’ll get our enterprise-grade Disaster Recovery as a Service free for 3 months, with no upfront costs. With solutions to suit all budgets, we’re committed to working with you to tailor a solution that meets your needs.
To discuss your requirements and make the most of our limited time offer, get in touch with us today.
