Be Prepared for the When…Not If
Forty percent of businesses that suffer a disaster never reopen. Of those that do, 25% fail within the first year. Data center downtime and unplanned disasters can cost organizations millions. Could your business recover?
International Data Corp estimates companies lose an average of $84,000 for every hour of downtime. Strategic Research places that number closer to $90,000 per hour. And according to a recent NFIB National Small Business Poll, man-made disasters have affected 1 in 10 small businesses while natural disasters have affected more than a third of small businesses in the U.S. (Hurricanes are by far the most destructive disaster, causing power outages, flooding, customer loss and the closure.)
Major disasters aren’t the only threat your business faces. Online risks are increasing at an alarming rate. Analysts at IDC say about 70% of all successful network attacks are carried out by staff or insiders. Is your organization prepared to survive the following?
- Major hardware failure in a critical system
- Software corruption
- Cyberattack or ransomware
- Power and telecommunications outages
- Natural and site-wide disasters
Do you have a plan? How often do you test it? Are you meeting your Restore Point and Restore Time Objectives (RPO and RTO)? Does your plan involve the costly and time-consuming reconstruction of servers, reinstallation of applications and restoration of data from tape or other off-site media? Do you have the hardware resources and facilities available to bring data back online if your primary data center suffers a disaster?
Server virtualization technology has provided ways to address many of the above questions, but it doesn’t offer a complete solution. Your company still needs the facility and hardware to restore snapshots and data. Procurement and provisioning hardware and maintaining a second site for DR can be a costly proposition. So much so that many companies choose to forgo these costs and live with additional risk.
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) minimizes the additional costs associated with hardware and a second site by providing these resources as a service. For a minimal monthly charge, these resources can be turned up on demand via a web portal. This model means any size company — from SMB to large enterprise — can mitigate its DR risks with an economically feasible solution.
