“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” – these are the beginning words of any ungodly long sentence that Charles Dickens uses to open his iconic novel, A Tale of Two Cities. Yes, very wordy. Unforgettable, nonetheless. Dickens was paid by the word, and he sure was keen to get his money’s worth out of this story from his publisher. But this approach shouldn’t apply to your IT team though, which is why you shouldn’t let cost alone dictate your organization’s recovery choices.
The Same Old Story
The problem is that so many organizations, especially those in the public sector space, are saddled with constrictive tech budgets, so every penny must count when it goes toward IT projects. Disaster Recovery (DR) is often one of the first items to fall by the wayside in favor of other pressing priorities. But if we’ve learned anything over the past couple of years, it’s this: cybercriminals sniff out areas of low-hanging fruit and pick with glee. DR has become an area of low-hanging fruit. And it makes sense, right? Your organization’s most crucial datasets are stored in an environment that often receives less attention than your production environment, which means slower monitoring for infiltration, and thus, slower response.
The purpose of a DR plan is to provide the rest of your organization with the confidence that when a disastrous event occurs, you can recover. But there are a lot of disaster types these days, from hurricanes to wildfires to ransomware—and the list of what can take down a business is ever-growing.
Here’s a video of common pitfalls to avoid when planning your DR:
This challenge leads to the major question: What does it take to protect an organization in today’s landscape? And beneath that larger question lies a slew of other important, more technical questions: When is the last time you tested that DR plan? Was it a successful test? How much has your DR environment changed since that last test? How have you tiered your DR for optimized spending?
The Purpose of DRaaS
These are all questions that Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) seeks to address. Since a business must now plan for a growing myriad of event types, DRaaS casts a wider net for protecting business by emphasizing iteration instead of a check-the-box approach.
Indeed, with a fully managed DRaaS solution, you offload aspects of resiliency that otherwise would’ve fallen to the IT department to test and manage, so that you can focus on other priorities. The DRaaS team designs and implements your DR plan with your own IT team’s input, then handles the playbook development after testing your solution.
Without vs. With DRaaS
Without a DRaaS solution, a business might as well be left to the whims of whatever traditional DR solution exists. But with DRaaS, a team of experts stands on-hand to recover your systems for you, all within an agreed-upon SLA timeline. When you think about weather-related events, such as the many wildfires that have ravaged California in recent years, often IT staff are more concerned with their families’ safety than recovering organizational IP—and I’d say, rightfully so. With DRaaS, the recovery team is in an altogether different geographical location, and they are singularly paid to give your datasets full attention, as is needed.
So, the difference between doing DR on your own and having a provider do it for you is that you end up saving a lot of time and resources on your end when choosing DRaaS. If you’d like to learn more about InterVision’s DRaaS offerings, check out our webpage here.
