Fortunately, a good disaster recovery (DR) solution can mitigate downtime as well as ensure your organization’s cyber resilience during a disaster or cyberattack.

Disaster Recovery solutions vary considerably, with the best ones capable of recovering nearly 100% of applications and data. However, the better the Disaster Recovery solution, the more costly and labor-intensive it tends to be. Traditional Disaster Recovery requires:

• investments in on or off-site data centers
• servers and other hardware
• Disaster Recovery software licenses
• and IT staff with DR expertise

Another option for Disaster Recovery is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). DRaaS is a complete recovery environment in the cloud, enabling rapid failover and recovery. The infrastructure and DR environment are owned and managed by the DRaaS provider. Organizations pay a monthly fee to maintain their recovery site, including ongoing data replication and disaster recovery testing. 

We know this is the case for x86 environments but is this still true for environments based on IBM Power Systems? In this post, we explore how DRaaS works for IBM Power Systems as an effective approach to protecting critical systems. 

Does DRaaS work for IBM Power Systems?

DRaaS for IBM Power Systems environments is like DRaaS for x86 environments. A managed DRaaS solution is hosted and maintained on IBM Power Systems servers within secure data centers. With this solution, customers get the benefit of a managed Disaster Recovery environment with IBM hardware and expertise. All at a fraction of the cost of a private DR solution.

IBM supports several methods for replicating data, including logical replication, SAN to SAN, or virtual tape libraries (VTL).

• Logical replication, which makes use of IBM’s built-in journaling capabilities, continuously copies the most recent data to the recovery site. It’s possible to capture data and transactions almost immediately after they’re written to the production environment.
• SAN to SAN replication in the cloud is a slightly lower-cost method often used for large volumes of data. Transactions written to the local SAN are copied to a remote virtual SAN in the provider’s cloud.
• Virtual tape replication is digital, virtual disk space designed to emulate tape drives but faster.

Any of those data replication technologies can be used in a DRaaS-for-IBM environment.

The cost of DRaaS will depend mainly on how much data, and how fast, an organization needs to recover. Different businesses have different recovery needs. An e-commerce company will want to recover every last transaction, while a brick and mortar furniture store might be able to lose a few hours of transactions without substantially hurting business.

If you need to get your IT systems restored within minutes: you’ll pay more for it than if you can wait an hour or so.

If you can’t afford to lose more than a second or so of data: your DRaaS costs will be higher than someone willing to lose an hour’s worth of data.

The value of managed DRaaS for IBM Power Systems

Managing your own Disaster Recovery environment is possible, but costly and time-consuming. It gets more costly and time-consuming the better the Disaster Recovery environment. Experiencing any of these scenarios with your in-house IBM Power Systems environment?

• Infrastructure costs for power, space, and equipment are growing
• IT budgets are constantly shrinking
• Finding IBM expertise is challenging. Finding staff with IBM and Disaster Recovery expertise is even more challenging.

Managed DRaaS providers can take the burden of infrastructure costs (while turning your cap-ex costs into op-ex costs), right-size a DR solution for your business with your budget in mind and provide that IBM expertise – all so your IT staff can focus on other IT projects important to your organization.

Get Help with Disaster Recovery for IBM Power Systems

DRaaS helps businesses optimize data resiliency and risk management. With our partners, we provide IBM Disaster Recovery Service for IBM Power Systems. Our service offers real-time replication and continuous monitoring, as well as IBM and DRaaS experts to assist in disaster recovery planning and service selection. Together, we handle maintenance, hardware upgrades, software licenses, storage, networking, hybrid cloud environments, and monitoring to create a seamless DRaaS experience for our customers. 

Learn more about IBM Disaster Recovery and DRaaS for IBM Power Systems.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, announced its 2022 Partner of the year awards at their partner advisory board. The award winners are key standouts for contributions to the Zerto partnership program. Awards are based on a partner’s ability to deliver high-quality, innovative solutions. Solutions should focus on the customer’s needs, like the protection, recovery, and mobility of on-premises and cloud applications.

For the second year in a row, Zerto has named TierPoint as the “Managed Service Provider (MSP) of the Year”. This award recognizes TierPoint’s Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution for protecting virtualized workloads from data loss and downtime. The solution offers a variety of configurations with failover to private, multicloud, and public cloud services in the event of a disaster. TierPoint delivered significant revenue growth over the past year and grew the number of Zerto-protected virtual machines (VMs) by more than two million instances.

TierPoint and Zerto’s long-standing, cooperative relationship has resulted in numerous successful joint customer wins and marketing efforts. The TierPoint team appreciates the knowledge Zerto’s cloud architects and sales teams bring and looks forward to another successful year of collaboration and success.

TierPoint’s Focus on Enabling Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Disruptions come in many forms. At TierPoint, we understand businesses need to be ready to handle those disruptions and ensure business continuity. TierPoint offers solutions that minimize data loss and downtime, house infrastructure in diverse geographies across the U.S., ensure solutions meet low RPO and RTO requirements and create a strategy around resilience to combat vulnerable workloads and ransomware attacks. They do this with a combination of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), Data Center, and cloud services.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (powered by Zerto)

Cloud-based disaster recovery is among the fastest-growing cloud services, and DRaaS enables recovery of your data, applications, and infrastructure – all within minutes. TierPoint’s Cloud to Cloud Recovery (DRaaS) solution flexibly fits your unique mix of recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), production environment, and recovery environment requirements.

Data Center Services

In combination with DRaaS, TierPoint offers backup solutions in its over 40 data centers across the United States. Because these data centers are geographically diverse, customers get additional resilience from natural disasters.

Hybrid IT and Cloud Services

The cloud has many benefits over traditional on-premises disaster recovery. Learn why disaster in the cloud is better than the alternatives. Our agnostic approach to the cloud enables us to manage your recovery and production workloads.

A complimentary playbook on overcoming business continuity challenges

Does your organization have a business continuity strategy? If so, does it account for more than one disaster? A great BC plan should account for various challenges and a roadmap to get your business operations back to normal. Download this complimentary eBook, The Ultimate Guide to Running Your Business Through Uncertainty and Disruption, to learn why you should make business continuity a top priority and how to overcome some of the biggest challenges.

For many of the reasons that cloud computing has grown in popularity, so too has the popularity of disaster recovery cloud vs on-premise. In fact, for many businesses, implementing disaster recovery in the cloud can provide an important step toward cloud migration – because data movers are a multi-use tool for IT. 

What is disaster recovery in the cloud?

Putting a mirror image of a production site on a second set of hardware in a data center was once a common disaster recovery technique. Now, such mirror images are often hosted in private or public clouds, ready to run on virtual machines at a moment’s notice.

Cloud-based disaster recovery as a service, or Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), is built to address the security and compliance needs of companies and to deliver quicker recovery of data and applications with less data loss than traditional IT disaster recovery.

DRaaS can compress traditional disaster recovery processes from days to minutes. With DRaaS, primary DR sites are replicated to the cloud, so data servers and applications can be restored as needed. As data changes at the primary site, the recovery site is updated to match.

Automation and orchestration allow for almost instantaneous failover to one or more clouds. When the primary site fails, control can rapidly switch to the secondary cloud site. When the outage is resolved, the primary site can regain control through a process called failback that ensures data stays current.

Virtual machines deliver recovery like a hot site, with much less overhead. Unlike cold sites and warm sites that take extensive engineering support and time to become functional, disaster recovery in the cloud can failover in minutes. Plus, maintaining and upgrading virtual machines is simpler than with physical hardware. Cloud-based storage doesn’t degrade like tapes and other media.

Cloud disaster recovery simplifies recovery for your IT staff, who won’t need to recover systems manually step-by-step during a high-stress outage. Instead, you set up automated failover, or place a single call to your DRaaS provider to say, “We need to recover.”

Types of DRaaS

Your primary site may be in a physical data center or in a private cloud, public cloud, or multicloud. Cloud-based recovery is a good choice for environments as wide-ranging as hybrid and multicloud. What’s more, if your production site is in a cloud, then disaster recovery in the same type of cloud offers additional advantages by allowing you to use the same security and compliance methods as your primary site.

The three main types of disaster recovery in the cloud differ by type of production environment. All of them can deliver near-zero data loss and fast failover with DRaaS. They include:

Cloud-to-cloud recovery

Powered by solutions such as Zerto’s IT Resiliency Platform and VMware’s vCloud Availability, a hypervisor manages replication to protect a virtualized production environment in a private or public cloud.

Hybrid cloud disaster recovery

Powered by a solution such as Azure Site Recovery (ASR), a cloud or hybrid environment is replicated and recovered to a cloud service such as Microsoft Azure. 

Server-to-cloud recovery

This type of disaster recovery in the cloud protects non-virtualized physical servers – including IBM, Oracle, and UNIX servers and mainframes – and multiple types of virtual servers, such as Hyper-V and VMware. 

How DRaaS manages replication

DRaaS replicates primary sites to the cloud, so your environment can be restored as needed when disaster strikes. When data is changed in the primary site, the recovery site also reflects those changes. 

Depending on how applications are tiered, some organizations might use multiple types of replication. Here are the three key types of replication, along with their pros and cons. 

Synchronous replication

Synchronous replication offers the shortest recovery point objective. Data is written to multiple sites at the same time, so the data remains current everywhere. It can be more costly and sensitive to latency, so it requires the sites to be closer to each other. 

Asynchronous replication

Asynchronous replication is often the preferred replication type. Data is written to the primary storage array first and copied to replication targets in real-time or at scheduled intervals. Asynchronous replication requires less bandwidth, is less expensive, and works over larger distances. 

Backup services

This type of replication limits data loss but doesn’t enable the best recovery. Data is archived and stored. This is only recommended for recovering non-critical data. Backup services include cloud storage/backup services and other online backup services, remote file backup, and local tape or disk backup. Backup as a Service (BaaS) offers the best protection from data loss. 

Cloud disaster recovery vs. cloud backup and Backup as a Service (BaaS)

The main difference between disaster recovery and a backup is that a backup only stores the data – without the IT infrastructure and applications that are necessary to make use of the data. Security of backup data has always been an issue. Backing up data in the cloud can better secure the data in motion and off-site storage than a physical drive, disks or tapes. 

Backups are known for being inadequate for businesses that need a short recovery time objective and minimal data loss. A nightly backup can result in the loss of a day’s worth of data. Although backups aren’t an effective recovery option, they are good for data retention and archives. Learn how backup and DRaaS can work together. 

Backup as a Services (BaaS) allows you to backup cloud, hybrid, and on-premises data to a private or public cloud. BaaS can improve security and reduce backup storage volume with deduplication and compression. An example of a BaaS solution is Veeam Cloud Connect. 

Cloud disaster recovery vs. cloud backup and Backup as a Service (BaaS)

• Recovery time objective (RTO) – The acceptable amount of time from failure to restoration of business systems and services after a disaster. 
• Recovery point objective (RPO) – The maximum amount of data loss the business deems acceptable following a disaster or failure. 

Also read: 3 RTO and RPO Considerations for Your Disaster Recovery Plan 

Find the best disaster recovery solution for your business

Your business is different from every other business and your disaster recovery plan needs to be customized to fit the goals of your business and your specific IT environment. Many of TierPoint clients find DRaaS can offer ROI in addition to its role as insurance against an outage or disaster. Beyond business continuity, for example, the replication and recovery infrastructure provided by DRaaS can also enable your safe and secure cloud migration, improve the rate of security patching and help mitigate losses due to cyber-attacks such as ransomware. 

As a DRaaS provider, TierPoint helps organizations plan for and limit the impact of interruptions to data, application, and infrastructure – in natural disasters, cyber disasters, cloud migration, and routine maintenance and security management.  

We’ll meet you where you are in your digital transformation journey, including any combination of public cloud providers, managed services, a fully-managed TierPoint private cloud, colocation, and on-premises solutions. Contact us to learn how TierPoint can help strengthen your DR plan and strategy. 

The pandemic spurred a number of new IT trends and sped up the adoption of others. Many of these trends will be with us in the post-pandemic future. TierPoint identified three major cloud trends that took hold in 2020 and will continue to grow over the next two to three years.

Cloud trend #1: Increased cloud usage in healthcare

For several years now, the healthcare industry has gradually adopted digital technologies such as electronic healthcare records, online prescriptions, and telehealth appointments. But the COVID-19 pandemic increased the demand for these healthcare technologies.

Patients were wary of in-person appointments. Physicians treating COVID-19 victims needed to share information with colleagues at other healthcare providers. According to a June 2020 survey by McKinsey, healthcare providers at that time were conducting 50 to 175 times their usual number of telehealth appointments. For many patients and doctors, it was their first foray into video conferencing; by mid-2020, three in four patients used telehealth technologies, compared to 11% in 2019.

Cloud computing is now helping physicians and specialists to securely share patient data and collaborate on treatment plans. The adoption of cloud services (public and private cloud) is also helping hospitals and insurers reduce administrative and IT costs. This digital revolution in healthcare will continue, and McKinsey predicts that as much as $250 billion of current U.S. healthcare spending could be virtualized.

Also read: 6 Ways 2020 Accelerated Cloud Computing in Healthcare

Cloud trend #2: Serverless computing

One of the newer trends in cloud computing is serverless computing, sometimes called Function as a Service (FaaS). Serverless computing is a cloud-native model of application deployment aimed at making app development and deployment faster and cheaper.

According to Forrester’s Predictions 2021: Cloud Computing, the adoption of serverless computing is part of a general spike in the usage of cloud-native technologies, such as containers. A Forrester predicts that an estimated 25% of developers will be using serverless on a regular basis by the end of 2021.

Unlike Infrastructure as a Service, serverless computing is an event-driven execution model for delivering backend computing services to applications as needed, when triggered by user input or some other event. Applications can use pre-written services for functions like processing file uploads, connecting to data sources, running a batch process, or tracking changes to a database.

Developers can quickly create applications by writing just the front-end logic for a cloud application and making use of the provider’s prewritten backend services. The serverless provider dynamically manages server allocation and provisioning for the customer.

Serverless computing is already in wide usage, with at least a dozen vendors providing serverless services. Some of the big names in serverless computing include:

• Amazon’s AWS Lambda 
• Microsoft’s Azure Functions
• Google Cloud Functions
• IBM Cloud Functions (based on Apache Open Whisk) 

Key advantages of serverless computing include greater flexibility and scalability in application development and can reduce application deployment time to a fraction of the weeks or months required for traditional deployments. In addition, customers pay only for the computing services used, not by the server or number of users. That saves them from paying for the cost of unused CPU power or idle servers. And, of course, they avoid the investment and maintenance costs of running their own data center.

Cloud trend #3: Cloud Disaster Recovery

2020 was a wake-up call to IT managers to consider disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity planning. First, there was the pandemic. IT faced the challenge of connecting and provisioning remote employees with access to enterprise systems – a major problem for organizations with traditional, non-cloud IT systems.

Then came the sudden spike in cybercrime, especially ransomware attacks, which targeted home-based employees with inadequate security as well as city and state governments, healthcare organizations, and many small businesses.

Natural disasters also wreaked havoc in 2020. Wildfires, typhoons, earthquakes, derecho winds, tornados, and floods devastated many areas of the world. Before the end of August 2020, the U.S. had 22 billion-dollar natural disasters, a new annual record.

All these events motivated IT organizations to invest in better disaster recovery to ensure they could survive a cyberattack or other disaster. An increasingly popular option is cloud Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), a cloud-based Disaster Recovery solution that is hosted and managed by third-party providers. DRaaS providers typically offer multiple DR options, including advanced DR services such as automated failover and recovery, continuous data replication to the cloud, and access to specialists in cloud DR, cloud security, and cloud development.

DRaaS can include access to both management services and technical expertise. Few companies these days can afford to have DR experts on staff. DRaaS enables IT organizations to have a more effective, and affordable, DR solution.

In addition to cost savings, DRaaS can be accessed from any location, making it a great answer for companies with remote IT staff and businesses in high-risk locations (due to natural disasters).

As the cloud becomes the de-facto platform of choice for businesses, new cloud services and computing models will continue to emerge to support business problems. Cloud solutions save companies on infrastructure costs, while managed services providers are stepping forward to fill the skills gaps in small and mid-sized IT organizations.

Get ahead of the cloud trends with a trusted partner

Cloud trends are a great way to start a conversation about cloud adoption. Is your organization:

• Deploying a multicloud environment or working towards a hybrid cloud strategy?
• Determining the best cloud platform for a certain workload or application?
• Looking for a resilient solution to protect vital business applications and customer data?

A managed cloud services provider can help you find the best strategy and solutions for your business. At TierPoint, we offer comprehensive cloud, disaster recovery, and cybersecurity solutions to help organizations effectively manage their cloud infrastructure.

Download the complimentary Forrester report on Cloud Predictions for 2021 to learn more about some of the big cloud trends coming in the next few years.

2020 also gave us a new perspective on what a pandemic looks like. Instead of a Hollywood post-apocalyptic scenario where the streets are empty except for the zombies, we had empty streets sans zombies and businesses trying to stay afloat behind closed doors. We learned that life must go on even during a crisis.

Most of us are more than ready to put COVID-19 behind us, but before that happens, this would be a good time to re-examine the pandemic scenarios in your disaster recovery and business continuity plans.

Download: IDC Technology Spotlight: Enterprises Seek Disaster Recovery Services in 2021 for Data Resilience Post COVID-19

Planning for the next disruption

A good first step would be to ask the same kinds of questions you’d ask yourself after any other disaster scenario. How quickly were we able to respond? How effective was our response? What did the organization do well, and what could we have done better?

Making the answers to these questions quantifiable is a vital component of improving your strategy. In disaster recovery planning, recovery objectives drive strategy: Recovery time objective (RTO) refers to how quickly the business can get back up and running after a disaster. Recovery point objective (RPO) refers to how much data loss is acceptable during recovery. Normally, we think about these two targets in the context of a physical disaster, but they can be applied to pandemic-related scenarios as well.

Also read: A Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery Plan for Any Disruption

RTO is the most obvious as it answers the question of how quickly you could establish a work from home policy and give your employees secure access to the systems and data that would allow them to continue working. At first, RPO seems a little less relevant unless your transition to remote-accessible systems wasn’t as seamless as you had hoped. There’s always a chance of data loss when system access is misconfigured, or backup systems aren’t properly implemented.

In March of 2020, just as businesses were sending people home en masse, we wrote a post to help them make a smoother transition: Adapting IT Services for a Remote Workforce. This post may be worth revisiting as you continue to evaluate your response to COVID-19.

Building business resilience for the next disruption

For many organizations, creating greater business resilience will require a closer look at their IT infrastructure and how they support it. While it’s impossible to predict what the next unplanned disruption will look like, one thing we can predict is that distributed IT systems will need to be capable of handling more data than ever – an average of 30% more every year, according to our IDC Tech Spotlight. Bandwidth capacity and availability will be more important than ever.

Also read: Can Your Network Bandwidth Support Your Remote Workers and Customers?

While the IT modernization programs many businesses have embarked on as a result of COVID-19 will have long-term benefits, the global pandemic and the resulting economic slowdown have also acerbated budget concerns. According to the IDC Tech Spotlight, IT budgets will remain flat or see only single-digit increases in 2021, putting further pressure on IT departments to efficiently balance uncertainty against already constrained resources.

Finally, with the continued shortage of skilled IT workers, rapid IT modernization projects have forced enterprises to look to outside expertise and staffing to fill gaps in knowledge and skillsets.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) drives business resilience

COVID-19 has organizational leadership thinking about business resilience, more than ever before, and IDC expects this focus to fuel the Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) market. According to the research firm, this market was already on the upswing, growing by more than 22% between 2018 and 2019. After a slight slowdown in 2020, IDC predicts the DRaaS market will see a compound annual growth rate of 17.7% by 2024.

Disaster recovery is the IT element of business continuity planning. DRaaS is a shared responsibility between the managed service provider and customer. The managed services provider manages and executes the customer’s plan. There are several advantages to DRaaS:

Expertise

Disaster recovery isn’t something most IT people have a lot of experience with. Leveraging outside expertise can help ensure RTO and RPO goals are more readily attainable.

Adaptive

Technologies change all the time, and even the best disaster recovery strategy can quickly become outdated. A DRaaS provider can help keep plans up to date.

Tested

Disaster Recovery plans need to be periodically tested to ensure they work as expected. A DRaaS provider can do this with little to no disruption to your business.

Economical

While disaster recovery planning is essential, it isn’t something you do every day. Working with a DRaaS provider provides full-time expertise without the full-time expense.

Learn more about business resilience trends for 2021

When the world seems like it’s going crazy, choosing the right DRaaS provider means one less thing for you to worry about. Refer to the additional resources below to learn more about improving business resilience during challenging times, or reach out to us to discuss how TierPoint can help. Want to learn more about disaster recovery planning and Disaster Recovery as a Service? Read our complimentary Strategic Guide.

In this post, we’ll talk about the role backups play in a comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity plan. We’ll also take a quick dive into the benefits of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).

Are backups and disaster recovery the same thing? Hint: They aren’t

The goal of any disaster recovery plan should be to get the business’s information systems back up and running as fast as the business needs them to be. Note that I did not say “as fast as possible.” That’s because disaster recovery planning, like most IT decisions, requires tradeoffs. The tighter you set your recovery goals, the more you will have to invest in disaster recovery technologies in order to reach them.

[blockquote]Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - The targeted length of time from failure to restoration of business systems and services after a disaster.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – The maximum amount of data loss the business deems acceptable following a disaster or failure. [/blockquote]

Also read: 3 Recovery Objective Considerations for Your Disaster Recovery Plan

Backups are less expensive than other disaster recovery technologies, but they can incur the greatest data loss and longer recovery times. A backup is a timed event that occurs periodically, so even if you’re backing up your data to the cloud, your data is only as recent as your last backup. If you back up your systems every night at 7 PM, and your systems crash at 3 PM the next afternoon, anything recorded between 7 AM and 3 PM is lost.

It also takes longer to restore backups than it does to failover to a replicated site. This is especially true if you’re backing up to physical media and then storing the media offsite. You will need to retrieve that media before you can even begin the restoration process. This is one of the many advantages of cloud backups over physical media. Cloud backups are at least instantaneously available, even if they do need to be restored.

That said, longer recovery times and greater data loss may not be an issue for some workloads. It’s hard to tell you exactly which workloads are good candidates for backups without a Business Impact analysis. As an example though, maybe your systems can handle longer recovery times and more data loss. Maybe they can’t. What I can tell you is that you can save your organization significant budget dollars by creating a pragmatic disaster recovery plan that aligns workloads to the right technologies and costs.

Setting an RTO too long or an RPO too high can put the organization at unacceptable levels of risk. Conversely, setting RPO and RTO too aggressively increases costs and ties up capital.
   – The Strategic Guide to Disaster Recovery and DRaaS

So, are backups the same as disaster recovery? No, they’re not. But that doesn’t mean your backup strategy doesn’t have a place in your broader disaster recovery plan. In fact, it’s the cornerstone for planners looking to allocate their investments most effectively while protecting their organization from downtime and data loss.

Testing your backup and disaster recovery solutions

Databarracks has conducted an IT Health Check every year since 2008. In 2020, 85% of respondents said they had a disaster recovery plan as a component of their larger business continuity plan. That’s up from 76% in 2017, so businesses in the U.K. are at least heading in the right direction.

Unfortunately, only 65% said they had tested their disaster recovery plan within the last twelve months. These businesses are placing a lot of trust in their systems. ALL disaster recovery systems need to be tested at least once a year, but many should be tested much more often than that.

While Databarracks surveyed clients in the U.K., my hunch is that these organizations aren’t all that different from their U.S. peers. Business leaders don’t like to spend money and time on things they may never need. For IT professionals, it’s way too easy to move disaster recovery planning and testing down on the list of priorities as other, more urgent responsibilities crop up. While reprioritizing may seem like a good idea at the time, it can cost an IT professional (C-level execs, too) their job should disaster strike.

Read our recent blog post, Why You Should Test Your Disaster Recovery Plan, to learn more about the best ways to test your DR plan.

Learn more about how DRaaS and BaaS can work for you

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) can help ensure your business is prepared by aligning disaster recovery technologies, including backup technologies, to the recovery objectives you set for each of your workloads. With DRaaS, we’re also responsible for executing your plan, so you can respond to the needs of the business while we take care of making sure you’re protected. We’ll even test your disaster recovery plan to ensure it will work as expected, should you ever need it.

Contact us to learn more about DRaaS and the many different disaster recovery technologies.

That’s why resilience has become the watchword for 2020, and a top priority for CIOs everywhere. With the risk of disasters on the rise, IT resilience is critical to business survival. A resilient IT environment can not only survive a major disruption but can bounce back quickly from it. Employees can get back to work, business transactions can pick up where they left off, customers can communicate with service staff, and little to no data is lost. 

Business continuity and disaster recovery can help businesses achieve IT resilience. Below, we created a guide to the biggest trends & learnings we found in 2020.  

Disaster Recovery solutions differ

IT managers in 2020 spent time learning the differences in DR solutions.  

DR may be implemented in the cloud, in-house, or at a regional data center. In-house DR is more labor-intensive and costly than cloud DR, especially for a smaller business that lacks the budget to buy equipment, rent data center space, and pay salaries for DR experts. 

With cloud-based Disaster Recovery (or Disaster Recovery as a Service), the cloud provider owns and maintains the infrastructure. The DR software is deployed and maintained in the cloud—either by the customer or the cloud provider. DRaaS is cloud-based DR that is wholly owned and maintained by the provider for customers who pay a monthly subscription.  

One of the benefits of cloud-based DR is the resilience it can offer thanks to the redundancy built into cloud infrastructure—multiple power sources, network providers, servers, and so forth. Also, leading cloud providers maintain multiple data center locations, which ensures continued operations should one location go down. 

DRaaS is sometimes confused with Backup as a Service (BaaS). Like DRaaS, BaaS is owned and maintained by the provider, with customers paying a subscription fee for access. But unlike DRaaS, it protects only the data, not the applications.  

As the demand for fast-and-easy DR solutions has increased, so has the variety of DRaaS platforms and options.  For example, DRaaS is available for IBM I and AIX systems, IBM mainframes, as well as server-to-cloud and cloud-to-cloud recovery. DRaaS features may include the ability to do frequent testing, for instance, or access to DR consulting services, user-friendly tools such as drag-and-drop orchestration, or multi-cloud replication to allow the customer to replicate a production environment to two different recovery environments. Some. 

The most important difference between different DRaaS options—or between any DR solution— is how quickly it can restore a system and how much data is saved or lost. These are measured by two metrics — recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). The RTO is the length of time from disaster to recovery, while RPO is the maximum amount of data that the business can afford to lose in a disaster.  

DR solutions typically provide tiered levels of recovery options so that customers can define which categories of data get priority for recovery. Tiering enables customers to save money by assigning less important data to a lower tier while ensuring the highest level of recovery to critical business data.  

• Demystifying the “Service” in Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) 
• Is Disaster Recovery in the Cloud Better?  
• Four Common Myths about Disaster -Recovery-as-a-Service 
• What is Cloud to Cloud Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS)?  
• How DRaaS Enhances IBM Power Systems Resilience 
• Forging Your Path to IT Resilience with Cloud and DRaaS  

Simplifying disaster recovery infrastructure with HCI

DRaaS is increasingly popular because it’s comparatively easy and low-cost to manage. But DRaaS does have one downside: The customer has little control over the infrastructure, configuration, or performance of the DRaaS environment. Fortunately, a new infrastructure model promises to make do-it-yourself DR a bit easier and cheaper to deploy and manage.  

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is an alternative infrastructure model for organizations that want greater control over their DR environment but without the complexity and cost of a traditional in-house DR solution. HCI appliances come preconfigured with compute, storage, and networking capabilities, along with the appropriate software stack. HCI products provide a simple building block for creating DR environments that in-house IT staff can deploy and manage on their own. Many HCI vendors provide HCI appliances tailored for DR, making it even easier to create an in-house or collocated DR infrastructure. The environment can be scaled up by adding more HCI units.  

• The Benefits of Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Disaster Recovery 
• TierPoint’s DRaaS and Backup Predictions for 2020 
• Today & Tomorrow in Disaster Recovery and Backup 

Managed DRaaS and disaster recovery services

Customers have much a wide range of services available for implementing and managing their DR environments.  

Managed DRaaS is a category of DRaaS that includes services for planning and deployment, managing the server image, replicating production data to the cloud, and creating and executing the many detailed policies and procedures required by the customer’s DR environment. Managed DRaaS is especially popular with companies that lack the expertise or time to manage their own DR system. 

Disaster recovery management and consulting services are increasingly common. For example, TierPoint offers a wide range of services, from strategic DR planning and implementation to testing and management services. Testing is one of the most critical services, as it ensures there are no bugs or missing elements in your DR environment before a disaster happens.  

As the IT environments become more complex, the need for outside expertise will continue to grow. Fortunately, DRaaS and managed DRaaS providers can take on much of the burden of DR planning and management, and help ensure you’ll have a reliable, and rapid backup and recovery solution.  

Also read: Why You Should Test Your Disaster Recovery Plan 

More coming on Disaster Recovery and DRaaS in 2021

A managed service provider, like TierPoint, can help you develop your disaster recovery plan, test your plan, and help you meet your recovery goals. Learn more by contacting us today. 

Stay tuned for more disaster recovery and business continuity content to come in 2021 by reading the TierPoint blog.  

• cost containment and cost optimization
• business growth and profitability
• digital transformation initiatives
• cybersecurity

While diverse, these strategic goals share a common (and critical) factor: a reliance on high-quality data for success. As the report noted, businesses can’t hope to achieve their goals without access to credible, trustworthy information. Organizations require data to understand how to achieve greater cost efficiencies, to identify new market opportunities and areas of profitability. Without reliable data, businesses can’t analyze past mistakes, forecast future outcomes, understand customer behaviors, or provide strong cybersecurity.

To ensure the availability of critical data, IT departments are adopting cloud-based backup and recovery services. Cloud backup and recovery can help guarantee data availability and security. The Veeam survey found that organizations are using cloud backup services for about half of their backups. By 2023, organizations anticipate using cloud-based services for more than three-fourths (77%) of their backups.

Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) support business goals such as cost savings, business development and digital transformation, and cybersecurity. In this post, we examine how BaaS and DRaaS can impact those strategic goals we mentioned earlier.

How BaaS and DRaaS support strategic goals

Cost efficiency

Both BaaS and DRaaS support cost containment and optimization, for example, by substituting expensive capital investments in data center infrastructure with cost-efficient cloud services. With BaaS and DRaaS, an IT department saves on hardware, software, maintenance costs, staff, and facility expenses. Instead, the cloud provider supplies the infrastructure and labor, with the costs shared by the customers. Many providers also offer managed backup and DR services, a useful add-on service for the 44% of the organizations surveyed by Veeam that said they suffered a lack of IT staff skills and expertise.

Transformation and growth

Backup and DR services also support digital transformation and business growth. Because DRaaS and BaaS environments are rarely used except in an emergency, they can also serve as alternative environments for activities such as application development, testing, and data analysis. As a copy of the production environment, a DR environment is useful for many types of development and testing, as well as analysis of large volumes of data, without disturbing the production systems or impacting end-users. That gives the organization an enormous advantage in researching and testing new applications and technologies and in analyzing new business models.

Cybersecurity

Nearly a third of the surveyed organizations listed cybersecurity as their top challenge. One of the biggest cybersecurity threats today is ransomware, which encrypts the victim’s data, in some cases locking out the entire network, and holds it for ransom. Often, even with a ransom payment, the victim never gets its data back. While IT security solutions such as anti-malware, firewalls, intrusion detection, and encryption all help protect enterprise data, the most effective way to recover from a ransomware or other data-destroying attack is by having an up-to-date copy of the data. BaaS and DRaaS can enable a company to quickly shift operations to the cloud backup, which is protected from any malware that infects the on-premises systems.

Cloud data management and strategic goals

Backup and recovery are a subset of a larger category of solutions called cloud data management (CDM). Cloud data management providers typically offers data storage, automated backup, backup and recovery planning, migration planning, support services, data security, and remote access from any location. The provider may also offer disaster recovery (DR) services, data governance, data synchronization between applications, data conversion and cleansing, data compression, and other data management and migration services. Cloud data management makes it easier to manage and share data across multiple cloud solutions and providers. With half of the world’s data residing in the cloud by 2025, cloud data management is poised to grow even more.

An example of cloud data management is Veeam’s Cloud Data Management Platform. Along with backup, replication, and archival services, the Veeam platform also provides governance and compliance services, orchestration and automation, and data monitoring and analytics. Cloud data management with cloud backup and recovery services provide substantial support for business development, digital transformation, cybersecurity, cost optimization, and many other business and IT priorities.

Join us at BraveIT 2020

To learn more about the importance of data in achieving business goals , read our blog post: The 2020 CIO Cloud Data Management Initiatives. We’re also a sponsor of TierPoint’s BraveIT conference, where guest speakers and experts will discuss cloud data management, cybersecurity trends, disaster recovery trends, how businesses will pivot post-Covid and more.

BraveIT 2020 is an interactive, thought leadership and networking event designed for the modern IT professional. The 2020 BraveIT virtual conference will take place September 16-17 with multiple guest speakers and panels. See the full agenda and register today.

BraveIT Spotlights are guest blog posts from our 2020 BraveIT sponsors. Dave Russell is the Vice President of Enterprise Strategy at Veeam.

What is DRaaS?

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is the replication of data and the hosting of physical or virtual servers by an expert third-party service provider. That provider can deliver quicker and more complete disaster recovery, protecting the organization by maintaining business continuity.

As Gartner’s new Market Guide for Disaster Recovery notes, the DRaaS market has become more versatile and feature-rich over the past few years: “DRaaS providers are addressing value chain opportunities — from support for more workload types, to application assurance add-ons, to proactive services related to security and change management.”

Nevertheless, DRaaS is still a varied market and not all DRaaS providers can meet every need. IT departments need to consider the differences in DRaaS solutions and the trade-offs between different providers and between DRaaS and a traditional on-site disaster recovery environment.

Questions you should ask a provider before adopting DRaaS

1. Can the solution support multiple platforms?

While support for the x86 platform in DRaaS is ubiquitous, other platforms are far less likely to be supported. Gartner finds some support for the IBM Power Systems/AS 400, HCI, Unix, and mainframe platforms, although far less common than support for the x86. Likewise, hypervisor support differs. Most DRaaS providers support two or three hypervisors, such as Microsoft’s Hyper-V, Xen, KVM, or VMware ESX and ESXi.

2. Does it address hybrid environments?

DRaaS replicates workloads from virtual machines in the production environment – at a data center or in the cloud — to virtual machines in the recovery environment. However, most organizations today have hybrid environments with both physical servers and public or private cloud environments. Many also want to protect mobile and remote desktop environments. These disparate environments make it difficult to achieve a uniform, synchronized recovery environment. Maintaining different DR environments makes it more difficult. To synchronize processes and data across all applications. Perhaps the best approach for IT departments with hybrid IT environments is to find a DRaaS provider with data protection services across physical, virtual, cloud, and mobile environments.

Also read: Hybrid Cloud vs. Multicloud – What’s the Difference?

3. Will adopting DRaaS impact other IT initiatives?

Organizations in the midst of an IT migration or digital transformation project may want to wait before committing to a DRaaS provider. If an organization isn’t sure which workloads may change or what new platforms may be introduced, it’s going to be difficult to know if a DRaaS provider can support the future environment. However, working with a leading DRaaS provider that supports a wide range of platforms and technologies can alleviate some of the uncertainty.

Also read: The Strategic Guide to Disaster Recovery and DRaaS

4. Will it meet my stringent compliance requirements?

Organizations that must meet stringent security and data protection regulations have to carefully consider what they need in a DR environment. If they opt for an outsourced DR or DRaaS solution, they need to ensure that the chosen provider has experience and expertise in their industry’s requirements. Small DRaaS providers may specialize in only a couple of industries. But large providers almost always have expertise in a range of national and international data security and privacy laws, including the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, Sarbanes-Oxley, and the healthcare industry’s HIPAA law. DRaaS providers with proof of experience and regulatory certifications in a customer’s industry can be a significant help in achieving compliance.

Gartner advises IT organizations to assess the workload types and recovery locations, as well as future strategic initiatives such as application modernization, cloud migration when considering DRaaS vs a do-it-yourself DR solution. Other considerations include time-to-value and IT labor costs. Does the organization have the expertise and budget to do its own DR planning, run book creation, implementation, and management of the DR environment? Many DRaaS providers offer managed services both for the initial planning and implementation as well as the day-to-day monitoring and maintenance.

Learn more about DRaaS in our Strategic Guide

DRaaS is an ideal solution for companies that want to move their disaster recovery operations offsite and into the cloud, protect their mountains of vital data, and focus their IT staff on revenue-generating projects. A managed services provider, who specializes in disaster recovery, should be able to help you address the questions above and provide the right disaster recovery or DRaaS solution for your business. Want to learn more about Disaster Recovery as a Service or talk to an expert? Contact us today.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is a great solution to reduce that risk. Just like strong cybersecurity, disaster recovery is an investment in remediation, ensuring businesses don’t lose more data or time than they can absorb. While it might never be needed, it might also save the business from catastrophe. We know what DRaaS is (check out this guide if you want to catch up on Disaster Recovery and DRaaS), but many confuse the “service” with the technology that drives DRaaS. In this post, we’ll explain how the “service” part of DRaaS works.

Understanding the “service” in Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

Traditional disaster recovery solutions were hosted on a physical server at an on-premises data center or off-site at a partner data center facility. The components of a private DR environment include the data center or colocation facility, network connectivity, servers, software licenses, and IT staff. Typically, the customer is responsible for managing and maintaining the DR software and environment. If anything goes wrong or needs fixing, it’s up to the customer to fix it. A customer can also buy DR software and upload it to a public cloud server, saving on the cost of maintaining hardware and infrastructure. But the DR software and environment are still the responsibility of the customer.

DRaaS is a less labor-intensive alternative to traditional disaster recovery and backup. DRaaS is a cloud-based, subscription service managed by a DRaaS provider. As with all “as a service” cloud offerings, the customer pays a monthly or quarterly fee for use of the cloud-based DR software and infrastructure. Offerings vary. In some cases, the provider may own the entire process, infrastructure, and software. In other cases, the provider may provide access to the software and infrastructure, but the customer may be responsible for testing and failover. The possibilities are as varied as you can envision, so properly understanding who is responsible for what is very important.

There are numerous advantages to DRaaS. DRaaS potentially saves customers the cost of buying and maintaining hardware and space dedicated to disaster recovery and hiring DR experts to manage it. DRaaS providers have experts on staff to address the range of potential issues in DR and the cloud. Most firms can’t afford an in-house team of DR experts. In addition, DRaaS includes on-demand options so that customers can scale-up storage, memory, or compute power when needed.

Also read: How Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) Helps Solve DR Challenges

According to the Gartner Research Market Guide for Disaster Recovery as a Service, the DRaaS market consists of hundreds of providers, each with different technologies and methods for backing up systems, and varying capabilities to meet customer requirements for different workload types, geographical locations, support services, and recovery time objectives. But to be called DRaaS, the provider must have three basic components:

• on-demand use of cloud storage, virtual servers, and DR software,
• automated replication, recovery, and failover
• guaranteed recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) spelled out in an SLA. The RTO and RPO are critical measures of a DR strategy. RPO is the point in time to which the system will be restored and how much data and transactions may be lost, while RTO measures how long the system will be down. The shorter the RTO, the faster the company can get back to business.

DRaaS provides a ready-to-use DR infrastructure and software. Either the customer or the provider may manage the environments via a central console or dashboard which lets them set and initiate replication and failover processes, monitor DR metrics, run tests, and handle other DR tasks. While customers are responsible for initiating failover in a disaster, most DRaaS solutions offer automated failover which is triggered by an outage or other event chosen by the customer.

A note on fully-managed DRaaS

Another category of DRaaS is fully-managed DRaaS. Managed DRaaS providers offer the same cloud infrastructure and DR software. But they also take care of the customer’s DRaaS environment, including managing the server image, replicating production data to the cloud, and creating and executing the customer’s run book or manual for replicating and restoring the system. A run book is a detailed inventory of a DR environment, including all of the procedures

Want to learn more about the technical side of DRaaS? Watch this video below.

Learn more about DRaaS in our Strategic Guide

DRaaS is an ideal solution for companies that want to move their disaster recovery operations offsite and into the cloud, protect their mountains of vital data, and focus their IT staff on revenue-generating projects. DRaaS allows companies to avoid the costs of DR infrastructure while retaining control over their DR processes. Managed DRaaS adds operational support with minimal effort by the customer. Want to learn more about Disaster Recovery as a Service or talk to an expert? Contact us today.