- Regionally dispersed companies that must store data within the borders of a specific nation. Microsoft has data centers around the world, which helps accommodate nation-based compliance concerns.
- Companies that have not developed a comprehensive disaster-recovery program, but would like to get moving on one soon.
- Companies with relatively simple disaster-recovery needs and looking for a cost-effective solution.
If this sounds like your company, congratulations: You’re poised to exploit a diverse suite of powerful and economical cloud-based technologies and services. Just keep a few points in mind:
DRaaS and Azure have multiple advantages
There’s more to this service than Microsoft’s ubiquitous technology footprint and its global data center network:
- The pay-as-you-go cost structure makes the service economical for a broad range of companies.
- Data is replicated to Azure over a secure encrypted tunnel.
- Our experts handle every aspect of planning, deploying, and restoring according to your recovery-time and recovery-point objectives — freeing your IT people to focus on other pressing business needs.
- You can stop depending on obsolete tape backups.
Azure works best within well-defined parameters. We’ll help you figure out if it’s appropriate for your organization.
DRaaS built to your specific RPO and RTO
Every day, companies grow more dependent on digital technologies. Nobody wants a hundred-year storm or a cyberattack to put them out of business because it’ll take weeks or months to restore their IT infrastructure. Thus, most executives realize they need a comprehensive business-continuity program.
OnX designed our DRaaS to replicate and restore IT systems quickly — in hours rather than days or weeks. It works as a managed service that runs around the clock with our experts monitoring everything and escalating ASAP if needed. We also make sure your DR program coordinates with your vital technology partners.
Even so, it’s only the digital-technology component of a business-continuity program, which also must address a raft of emergency-related issues that are only tangentially relevant to recovering lost IT systems. Therefore, it’s vital to make sure your DRaaS dovetails with a holistic BC strategy.
DRaaS must be thoroughly planned, tested, and documented
Before the advent of cloud technologies like Azure, a lot of people backed up to tape and hoped for the best. Large, well-resourced enterprises could afford to keep duplicate data centers and comprehensive disaster recovery programs, but that wasn’t much of an option for smaller companies.
The cloud creates economies of scale that enable many more organizations to develop robust disaster recovery programs. Alternately, they can build more modest systems that restore mission-critical services rapidly. Whatever they choose, they need a DR program with three fundamentals:
- Planning. System architecture must be mapped out in advance and resources carefully allocated to make sure your solution matches your business needs.
- Testing. Before deploying the technology, you need to test it against several scenarios to ensure your recovered systems come back online as planned. You also need to coordinate with any vendors that rely on your technology. (See “3 Essential Steps for Disaster Recovery Testing.”)
- Documentation. You never can tell who will be available to implement your data recovery in an emergency. If you document your system effectively, you’re not reliant on a single person’s memory of an obscure setting if glitches arise. (See “3 Reasons to Document your DR testing.”)
With three decades of experience building, configuring, and managing data centers, OnX understands the complexities of getting disaster recovery right. We also have highly trained IT experts certified across a range of Microsoft technologies. These are the kinds of skills you need to deploy DRaaS successfully on Azure cloud servers.