With the importance of disaster recovery solutions to the continuity of your business, it goes without saying that decisions regarding this area of your IT environment should not be made without thought.  After all, your backup and disaster recovery system is your saving grace in the instance of a disaster. Remember,  you aren’t just picking any backup and DR solution, make sure to choose the platform that is most appropriate for your business needs. This also means that, if you are going the cloud route, you need to choose a service provider that aligns well with your company’s goals and initiatives. But how do you pick the best DR solution and service provider combination for your business? Here are 3 considerations your company should keep in mind when choosing a DR solution and service provider.

1. Identify the Right Solution

When selecting a DR solution, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the numerous options and the latest technology on the market. When this happens, it’s best to take a step back and identify which DR solution fits your specific business needs. Is the majority of your data mission-critical? Do you have plans to grow the amount of data you backup? What are your RTOs and RPOs?

More and more frequently, companies have been turning to cloud-based solutions for their ease of deployment, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. The right cloud solution for you will depend on your existing IT infrastructure, pricing model and more. To help you understand which solution is a good fit, check out this quick breakdown of cloud solutions:

Need more information? Check out our blog on Public Vs Private Vs Hybrid cloud.

2. Select a Service Provider that Understands Your Goals

The right solution for your business would not be complete without choosing the right service provider to host your solution.  Whatever DR solution you choose, it is important to make sure that you have done your due diligence to select a service provider that aligns with your goals. But first, make sure you understand what those goals are. How often will you be backing up? Are there any restrictions on where and how your data can be hosted?

Outlining your backup and disaster recovery goals helps both parties to: 1. select the right solution and 2. remain accountable. These goals can be identified as part of a larger disaster recovery plan.

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3. Don’t be Afraid to Ask Questions

Make the process of selecting a service provider easier on yourself by asking the right questions. Too often companies become dissatisfied with their service providers because they did not ask the tough questions during the decision process. Ultimately, you want to find a service provider that offers solutions with:

• Geographic Redundancy
• Ultra-Low Latency and High Availability
• Flexible Pricing Model
• Compatibility with your Existing Hardware

To understand if your service provider meets the above criteria, you have to ask! Make sure to ask:

• What IT assets a given DRaaS offering can protect?
• How these assets are made available for recovery?
• How can the offering integrate with existing backup solutions?
• And many more!

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The Bottom Line

Here at Otava we have worked with mid-enterprise CIOs for more than 30 years. Throughout this time we have installed, maintained and upgraded all varieties of backup and disaster recovery systems, while watching things like cloud computing and virtual environments become mainstream. Our tech providers understand the true value of the options available to you, and are ready to help you find the BDR that is most suited for your needs and expectations. Check out our video case studies!

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When it comes to disaster recovery planning, it is important to distinguish between natural disasters and those that are man-made. Though both types of disasters are unpredictable, man-made disasters (disasters  due to human error or technological malfunctions) are, at least, avoidable. Identifying the types of man-made disasters that could impact your business takes an immense amount of critical thinking and foresight. However, taking the time to identify areas of risk can be an advantage when implementing backup and disaster recovery.

City-wide Disasters

If you are based in a metropolitan area or an urban center, there are certain disasters that are more likely to impact you. For example, stampedes, rioting and looting can result from mass chaos following disasters (such as political upheaval, flooding, explosions or earthquakes); and are far more common in cities than rural areas.

Another city-wide disaster that may affect your business is urban fires; which more commonly occur among apartment complexes, skyscrapers and office complexes. If your company is located within one of these risk areas, be sure to incorporate fireproof methods within your disaster recovery planning. One of the easiest ways to do this is by utilizing an offsite repository for your backup copies. After all, backup is worthless if your on-site server goes up in smoke.

Additionally, blackouts and power outages can cause havoc for companies that need systems up and running 24X7. To prepare for unexpected power outages, ensure that your systems are set up to automatically fail over to an offsite recovery, or protected by a backup generator.

Industrial Disasters

In respect to industrial complexes, there are several man-made disasters that come to mind, including: oil spills, nuclear explosions and industrial accidents. While these disasters are unexpected, you can save your company from serious loss in an industrial disaster by taking steps to prevent them.

You can reduce the effects of industrial disasters on your business by implementing backup and disaster recovery solutions (BDR). Thanks to your use of a BDR you can handle the immediate crisis with a cool head knowing your data is stored safely and ready to restore your systems. Additionally, be aware of your surroundings; if you see signs of an industrial disaster, contact the authorities immediately.

Universal Disasters

Some man-made disasters can strike almost anywhere, creating a greater threat than urban or industrial disasters. For example, war, bioterrorism and nuclear bombings are all man-made disasters that could take place in practically any city or neighborhood. These disasters rely on the element of surprise, therefore you preventing them is likely not in your company’s hands. What you can do is find a BDR site that is away from your home front, ensuring the safety of your data.

Hosting Data Offsite

How can man-made disasters create havoc for your company? For starters, computers and servers are fickle things which can easily be damaged, destroyed or stolen in the instance of a man-made disaster. If you are interested in keeping your data out of the cloud, there are options for making sure your data remains onsite and safe…just not on your work site. Consider hosting your backup and data recovery in a location that is at least 500 miles away from your business. Think about it: disasters do not typically span more than 500 miles from a location. By housing your BDR offsite in a well-secured location, you can pick up the pieces after a man-made disaster and keep your business afloat. Otava offers backup and DR at several strategically sound locations throughout the US:

• Denver, CO
• Phoenix, AZ
• Los Angeles, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• New York, NY
• Dallas, TX
• Atlanta, GA
• Chicago, IL
• Columbus, OH

Bring your backup and DR full circle by hosting it with us in one of these major cities. By hosting off-site with Otava, you benefit from the most advanced infrastructures in the US. Let Otava help you reach the pinnacle of disaster recovery planning.

Not ready to talk yet, well download our Disaster Recovery (DR) Checklist to give yourself a head start!

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1. Application Dependency Mapping (ADM)

As GI Joe once said, “knowing is half the battle.” Knowing your application dependencies means mapping all your business’s apps to user groups, by priority of availability, and by their dependence on other applications. A well-executed map will provide you with the necessary information to gain a global perspective on your IT environment and distinguish essential, from non-essential, business practices needed in your plan.

2. Identifying Mission-Critical Systems and Applications

Using cloud DR to cover every system that your company operates might not be the best use of your resources. So, it’s a good idea to decide early on which data should be replicated first and where to do it, based on whether the information is mission-critical or not.

The goal of this exercise is to determine which data set needs to be replicated in real time versus those that can be replicated at a slower rate for business continuity purposes. Defining data sets as mission-critical and non-essential makes it easier to develop a concrete DR policy

3. RTO and RPO

A solid data replication strategy is defined by recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) by application. Basically, ask yourself how long can you be without critical workloads and how much data loss can the business reasonably absorb?

Having firm RTO and RPO for data sets helps better define your business priorities and gives you a clearer picture of how best to address recovering data and getting back online after an incident

4. Maximizing ROI of Cloud DR

Proving ROI is basic responsibility for any CIO. Deriving value from your cloud DR solution starts with identifying the core purpose for moving to the cloud in the first place.

Cloud DR helps to reduce the cost, complexity, and time it takes to replicate your most essential information, freeing your team of time-consuming manual processes and hardware standup to let them focus on higher-value activities. But if you have items that aren’t at the top of the replication priority list, why use resources to move them to the cloud at all?

Clearly outlining how, where, and by whom data is replicated will help you allocate resources and assets appropriately. From there, you can accurately measure actual numbers for hardware cost avoidance, billable man-hours, and other metrics to compare against your capital investment to arrive at an ROI figure.

5. Put your Cloud DR Plan to the Test

Things don’t always go according to plan. That’s the point of a DR policy in the first place. But even DR policies need to be put to the test and validated to ensure they’re designed for optimal effectiveness and efficiency.

Understanding how your current environment operates and how you plan to improve it with a cloud deployment will help you test for weak points in the concept.

Your concept validation should start with some basic questions:

• What are you trying to accomplish with a cloud solution?
• Are you using a cloud deployment for straight DR or will it also be used for testing and development?
• How much data needs to be backed up?

Analyzing your business’s structure (“hot” DR vs. testing/development sites), needs and goals, and comparing them to your cloud DR plan is an essential step for getting the most out of your DR solution.

The Bottom Line

If you’re looking for some direction, or just want more information, contact a Otava specialist today and learn about customized Cloud DR Solutions that will complement your business’s availability strategy.

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We often hear about the importance of disaster recovery and backup to the success of our businesses. Often lumped together under the umbrella “BDR”, backup and disaster recovery are mentioned so much in the IT industry that they seem to be more like buzz words than actual business solutions. For this reason, backup and DR have become heavily associated terms, sometimes used interchangeably.

In the midst of all of this jargon and confusion, the crucial thing to understand is that backup and DR are NOT one in the same, but two separate concepts. These two concepts are, however, both important to include in your business strategy. For the purpose of creating two plans (one for backup and one for DR) you will first need to understand the difference between the two.

Understanding Data Backup

Data backup is the process of backing up and retrieving your business information from one device to another. Often, devices are backed up to tape, disk or, more likely, to the cloud. Backups should be done frequently, in compliance with your company policies on recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives, to avoid excess downtime.

However, there are instances in which backing up data is not enough to ensure the continuity of your business. For example, what if the backup you created earlier is damaged or stolen? What if your company stores its backups in the same location as the original file and there is a disaster?  This is where an offsite disaster recovery solution comes into play.

Deciphering Disaster Recovery

Disaster Recovery (DR) is a broad term that tends to encompass a wide range of concepts and solutions. These solutions ultimately work together to recover your IT environment and restore it to working condition immediately following a disaster. One way to understand the difference between DR and backup is that backup is a subcategory and important part of DR. This means that backup can be considered DR, but not all DR is backup. There are three specific things that can decipher disaster recovery from backup.

• DR provides a shorter RTO than backup
• DR is a live replica of the production environment, where backups may only be taken nightly.
• DR should always be placed in a geographically diverse, offsite network.

Backup and DR in the Cloud

A large portion of businesses without backup and disaster recovery plans never recover from the cost of downtime. If you are looking for a quick and simple solution to remedy your lack of a backup or DR strategy, the cloud is a great place to start. Not only is the cloud easy to deploy and scalable, it is the fastest way to get your data offsite. While a server in-house can fail or be destroyed in a disaster, data hosted in the cloud is safe from harm. You can take the fist step by choosing a leading and professional cloud provider.

The Bottom Line

The goal for any business with IT demands is to remain up and functioning even in a moment of crisis or devastation. Having a strategy when it comes to data backup and disaster recovery is essential for any size business in this globalized, high-tech world. Let Otava help you plan for the unexpected. Contact Otava today to speak with a tech professional about the best options for your business.

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Cloud technology has been disrupting IT for quite some time now, and that trend shows no signs of changing anytime soon. But for companies who have yet to make the shift to the cloud, it is easy to use examples like Amazon’s recent outage to justify sticking to traditional on premise infrastructure, instead of moving to an infrastructure-as-a-service model.

Though Amazon’s outage caused wide spread havoc for many of its customers that experienced slow downs or downtime, it serves as a good lesson for companies looking to invest in cloud computing to do their due diligence when choosing a provider. Though there are numerous benefits to offloading workflows to the cloud (improved flexibility, lower infrastructure costs, increased innovation, etc.), There is still risk involved that companies should do their best to mitigate. In fact, a mitigation strategy should be part of every business disaster recovery plan. Consider these 5 tips to reduce your risk of cloud outage and your company can avoid ever getting Amazon-ed:

1. Plan for the Worst:

It the IT world, downtime is an ugly word; but planning to fail can help to reduce your company’s risk. Develop a mitigation strategy by creating detailed cloud breakdown scenarios. Work to ensure your company can come back online quickly and efficiently by performing recovery run-throughs. Planning for the worst means always being prepared in the event of an outage.

2. Always Test Your Plan:

Having a DR plan and mitigation strategy in place is a great start to being prepared for a disaster, however a plan is just a plan unless its put the test. Testing your DR plan is the most important step in actually developing a DR plan; its also the step that most companies miss. In fact, the cloud presents the perfect environment to implement a DR test, as you have the ability to develop a sandbox to simulate a disaster and evaluate your DR plan.

3. Don’t Outsource Everything:

One of the major benefits of the cloud is that service providers can take away the headache of managing your IT environment. While this is a great feature, there is something to be said for keeping staff on hand who are familiar with your IT environment and have knowledge of how to handle cloud problems. In the event of an outage, these techies can ensure your business recovers quickly.

4. Invest in Redundancy

Investing in the cloud provides huge cost savings for companies that no longer nees to invest in their own infrastructure. Instead, these Capital Expenditures (CapEX) are moved to Operational Expenditures (OpEX), as service providers help to manage and operate your IT. However, with these cost savings in mind, going the cheapest route is not necessarily the best idea. Since the big players in Cloud computing have emerged, it has been a fight to the bottom in terms of cloud pricing. However, it is important not to get hung up on who is the cheapest, but who has the best solution for the price. The ROI on investing in cloud solutions that have redundant infrastructure and fail safes in place is HUGE in the event of an outage.

5. Choose the Right Service Provider

There are a lot of Cloud Service Providers out there for companies to choose from, but picking the right one is the secret to success. Read and understand your Service Provider’s SLAs. Talk to their existing customers and ask questions about their quality of service. Make sure you find a provider that cares about your success, and offers top quality support staff to help you in the event of an outage. Finding your Cloud Provider “Sweet Spot” isn’t an easy task, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. Know what your company needs in a cloud provider and ask the tough questions to find it.

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Selecting the right disaster recovery solution for your business can be a trying task. With data security and recovery such an important part of your business’s continuity, DR is not something to take lightly. This decision involves many factors. When we consider the most important factors of DR – recovery, security and redundancy- it is not difficult to understand why many companies are making the shift to the cloud. 

5 Reasons Why you Should Invest in Cloud-Based DR

In addition to the numerous benefits of deploying a cloud-based solution, cloud DR (disaster recovery as a Service or DRaaS) offers users specific advantages over alternative solutions. 

1. Legacy DR doesn’t cut it

Legacy BDR solutions are often complex and assembled from a variety of vendors, making them slow and difficult to manage. Cloud solutions, on the other hand, work to simplify the backup and DR process with set it and forget it backup methods. You no longer need to manage multiple vendors and multiple backup cycles. 

2. Rapid Recovery

When your company is experiencing downtime, the only thing that matters is getting your business back online fast. With cloud-based DR your environment can be easily failed over to the cloud to get your business back up and running in an emergency.

3. Geographic Redundancy

It is a best practice of backup and DR to ensure you have multiple copies of your data, but if these copies are located in the same place it doesn’t do you much good if a tornado hits. It is important to ensure that you have a copy located at least 500 miles away to ensure geographic redundancy. With cloud BDR solutions, you can back up your data to multiple locations and easily restore.

4. Cost-effective

For companies that do not currently have a strong solution in place, cloud backup and DR is fast, secure and reliable; and it is also affordable. There is little to no upfront capital cost and no expensive hardware purchase involved. This allows you to move your CapEX to OpEX and focus more on operating your business and less on troubleshooting your DR environment.

5. Return on Investment

Traditionally, the reason that companies did not invest in a backup or DR solution is because of the time and money it took to deploy an on premise solution. We have already touched on the fact that a cloud solution is more cost effective than the alternative, but it is also important to consider the ROI of BDR.

Consider the impact of downtime on your business. Will you loose sales if you are taken offline? Will your customers choose your competitors? Will you be able to operate if you cannot access your data? How much revenue will this cost you? How will it impact your reputation? What if you were down for 1 hour? What if you were down for a day?

Studies show that a majority of companies that do not have a backup or DR solution in place will never recover from the loss of data in the event of downtime. When we think about all the ways that downtime can destroy our reputation and potentially our business, the RIO of disaster recovery solutions is easy to see.

The Bottom Line

When you evaluate all of the reasons why your business should shift to the cloud, you will undoubtedly uncover many more reasons than those outlined above. Not only are cloud solutions a catalyst for growth, they help companies gain a competitive advantage by enabling their employees to innovate more and troubleshoot less. Selecting a cloud-based backup and disaster recovery solution will give your business additional peace of mind and ensure your data is protected.

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But let’s take a step back here. Before you begin implementing a disaster recovery solution, cloud-based or otherwise, your company should undertake an immense planning and consideration process, in which you evaluate your current IT environment. During this process, It is important to understand what your DR goals are and what sort of solution will help you to achieve them. Let us explore the steps of the DR planning process that lead to implementation, and the steps that come after. 

How to Implement an Effective DR Solution

We’ve outlined the planning and implementation process below:

Step 1: Discovery

During the discovery process you will want to take inventory of your disaster recovery needs. What are your goals? What are your recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO)? Ensure you have an understanding of the gaps in your existing solution and what you need to improve upon to meet your goals.

Step 2: Stakeholder Input

Once you have completed the discovery stage it’s time to consult the stakeholders in your business and present your findings. It is important to make sure that everyone is on the same page when it comes to your company’s disaster recovery goals and the definition of an effective DR strategy. If stakeholders are not on board, your DR will suffer.

Step 3: Planning and Design

The stage that will take the longest in the DR implementation process is planning and design. It is crucial to ensure that your disaster recovery solution will meet your business needs, be compatible with your existing environment and actually work once implemented. This stage will likely consist of several design options and a lot of trial and error.

Step 4: Product Selection

Once you have outlined the plan and design of your DR environment, it is time to select your solution. Based on step 3 you may find that your optimal solution consists of a combination of on premises and cloud-based backup and disaster recovery services. Whatever your product or solution of choice, step 4 and 5 go hand in hand.

Step 5: Vendor Selection

In the process of selecting the right solution for your business, you must also select the right vendor. When evaluating cloud service providers it is important that you choose one who understands your business goals and will help you to achieve them. Keep in mind the provider’s SLA, certifications and policies around data management, as these are crucial to disaster recovery.

Step 6: POC & Testing

Once you have selected your product and vendor, it’s time to put the combination to the test with a proof of concept. You wouldn’t buy a car without a test drive, so make sure you try out you solution and provider combo to work out the kinks before implementation.

Step 7: Implementation

Implementing a DR solution, with the help of a competent service provider, does not have to be a long and complicated process. As long as you have done your due diligence through the previous steps, implementation should be simple.

Step 8: Monthly DR Testing

Sadly, many companies believe that their DR planning process has been completed with step 7. However, an effective DR solution includes a test to ensure it works the way it is intended to. Putting your DR strategy to the test is crucial. You cannot be sure your data will be protected in a disaster unless you put it to the test. And simply testing once does not a sound solution make. DR plans should be tested monthly to make sure they are functioning properly.

Step 9: Upgrade & Update

In addition to monthly testing, it is important to stay up to date with product patches and updates. We often see that many ransomware attacks could have been prevented by updating software. If this is an area where your company really struggles, perhaps consider outsourcing the management of updates and patches to your service provider. The updates and upgrades stage is a constant process that should be done monthly, if not weekly.

Step 10: Reporting

The final step in the process is reporting. It is important to ensure that you are continuously reporting and assessing the performance of your DR solution. It is through reporting that your company will evaluate how the solution is working toward the overall goals and objectives. It will also give your business benchmarks to improve upon. The reporting step should be performed often, on a continuous cycle with step 9, updates and upgrades.

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The post How to Implement an Effective Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery Solution in 10 Steps appeared first on OTAVA®.

These days, as CIOs are told to do more with less and find cost-effective solutions that meet business goals, the cloud has seen tremendous growth. One of the most cost-effective solutions that is seeing phenomenal uptake is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). According to Gartner, DRaaS is a $2.02 billion business currently, and it is expected to reach $3.73 billion by 2021.

What you Should Look for in a Cloud Disaster Recovery Solution

Making the decision to move to cloud-based disaster recovery seems like a no brainer, however companies must take a step back and consider what makes up an effective DRaaS solution. There are many features to consider as you make the shift to the cloud. In addition to bandwidth constraints and data size, the solution must factor in the following:

Network and Latency

When deploying cloud solutions, the speed of the connection is imperative. A Backup and DR solution is only as strong as the underlying network, as backup and replica jobs will take much longer if the network is slow. Additionally, the speed of recovery will be impacted and a higher latency network could mean more downtime for your business. It is important to find a cloud provider with a low latency network. Make sure to  review their SLA and understand their level of latency and downtime policy.

Ease of Use

Migrating to a cloud solution is supposed to make your life easier. Make sure that you conduct a POC of your solution to see if it is easy to use and manage.

Failover + Failback

A DR solution is useless if you cannot successfully fail over your environment to a secondary site and fail back once your primary environment is up and running.

Geographic Redundancy

It is a best practice to have multiple copies of your data on multiple devices, but it is also a best practice to ensure that at least one of those copies is located far enough that the data would not be affected by the same outage or event. This ensures that even if one copy is destroyed, your business will be able to recover.

Cost Effectiveness

One of the main benefits of choosing cloud solutions is that they are more affordable and cost effective than the alternative. It is important to evaluate your business’s environment and understand if the cloud makes financial sense for you.

RPO/RTO

The ability to meet recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives (RPO/RTO) is an important part of backup and recovery. If your solutions cannot get your business back online in a timely manner, this can mean lost revenue and customers.

Security 
When choosing a cloud provider, understand the security parameters outlined in their services and how your data will be protected. For most providers this means that your data will be encrypted in transit and at rest as well as held in a certified data center.

Testing
If you do not test your backup and DR solutions how can you be sure that they work? It is imperative that you conduct proper tests before there is a need to actually use the solution.

Scalability

Cloud solutions often give you the benefit of being able to grow as your data grows. Make sure that you find a provider that does not penalize you for this growth.

Reliability 
Cloud solutions should be reliable. Understand the SLA of your provider and how downtime could impact your business and make sure your solution will work. This is where testing your DR plan is important.

Bottom Line

There are many benefits to deploying a cloud-based disaster recovery solution. However, before you begin the implementation process, you must do your due diligence to ensure you have considered what kind of solution is right for your business, and what features you need to be successful. Taking the time to ensure your DR solution has the above requirements will drastically improve your level of confidence in your business’s DR strategy. Download our Disaster Recovery eBook to learn more about a cloud-based DR plan.

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Why should you invest in cloud-based backup and DR?

With the current landscape of cyber crime and the increase risk of attack, backup and DR have never been more important to business continuity. In addition to the numerous benefits of deploying a cloud-based solution, cloud backup and DR offers users specific advantages over legacy solutions. Cloud solutions work to simplify the backup and DR process with “set it and forget” it backup methods. You no longer need to manage multiple vendors and multiple backup cycles. 

For companies that do not currently have a strong solution in place, cloud backup and DR is fast, secure and reliable; and it is also affordable. There is little to no upfront capital cost and no expensive hardware purchase involved. It is also easy to deploy.

What should you look for in a solution?

When it comes to choosing a cloud-based backup and DR solution thre are several important factors to consider. Not only fo you have to make sure that the solution is a good fit for your business, you need to ensure that you have selected the right service provider to help you accomplish your DR goals.

Here are just a few factors that go into building an effective DR solution: Network, Latency, RTO, RPO, Scalability, Reliablity. Based on these factors, are you confident that you currently have the right solution in place?

The best place to start when searcing for a BDR solution is to evaluate the gaps in your current DR solution VS your ideal DR solution. Make specific objectives based on these goals and then find a service provider that can help deliver these objectives.

How do you implement a solution?

Implementing a disaster recovery solution, cloud-based or otherwise, requires immense planning and consideration for your IT environment. It is important to understand what your DR goals are and what sort of solution will help you to achieve them.

We’ve outlined the planning and implementation process below:

It is important to note that DR planning and implementation are never done. There should be a constant rinse and repeat cycle of upgrading and updating your environment and reporting on it.

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