The Cloud Lets Anyone Recover from Disaster
Small to midsize business (SMB) owners need to know what to do if disaster strikes. This goes beyond simple business cloud backup, though that's certainly a factor. Recovering lost data is a daily operation in many IT departments. A "disaster" refers to a complete halt of most or all of your systems simultaneously. If someone asks what your organization would do if all its systems went dark one fine day, and you can't answer that question with confidence, then you're setting yourself up for serious problems down the road—and that's "when," not "if." Disaster hits everyone sooner or later. Fortunately, the cloud and the internet combine to make recovering from system disasters easier and more accessible than ever.
Fortunately, today's options are not only more effective, they're also cheap enough to be affordable for businesses of any size. That's due to two important IT enhancements: software-based infrastructure and the cloud. Virtualization allows businesses to provision servers as software instances on top of disparate hardware. So, for example, SMB X may have a single physical server in a data closet somewhere, but using Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESXi (among other virtualization platforms), they could be running two, three, or more software servers on that hardware with each software instance looking and behaving like any other server as far as the network and users are concerned. By implementing servers as software-based instances, IT managers get the ability to back those servers up using the same methods they would for data.
Many SMBs dismiss planning a coherent disaster recovery (DR) policy because they believe such strategies are only for deep-pocket, enterprise-scale IT budgets. What can an SMB do? In the past, SMB-style preparation usually meant doing frequent backups and storing backup tapes offsite. Effective and cheap. Enterprise DR followed the same rules, but added provisioning for a hot-site, meaning another office that could be provisioned to house data center infrastructure and workers on short notice, or at the very least, have spare "dark" hardware and infrastructure capacity on hand to quickly replace failed systems. These measure do ensure some level of disaster-proofing, but they're both slow by today's standards and exceedingly expensive, which is why many SMBs opt to ignore DR entirely.
But while backing up your virtual servers to a separate disk or tape gives you the ability to restore the server on another server eventually, backing them up to the cloud puts them in another data center—a shared data center that can not only restore your servers, it can also initialize them and operate them just like you would and on just a few minutes' notice. That means instead of paying for another building with an expensive data center you'll only access in emergenices, you can configure a cloud account to continually backup the most recent instances of your servers and simply switch them on if the primary servers at your local site fail. Instant Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS). And, since most of these cloud services operate on a pay-as-you-use basis, this lets even small businesses operate with sophisticated DR options at a fraction of what it would have cost in the past.
In this roundup, we tested five different DRaaS offerings, including Carbonite Server Backup, Microsoft Azure Site Recovery, Quorum onQ Hybrid Cloud Solution, Zerto Virtual Replication, and Zetta Backup and Recovery. All of those solutions are based on the DRaaS model, combined with some client-side software, as well as remote storage options.
What is DRaaS?
During testing, we discovered that DRaaS vendors may loosely define exactly what DR consists of. Some vendors market their offerings as a simple, all-in-one solution, while others approach the DR market with a variety of options, such as SQL Server or MS Exchange-focused backups or complete server and even data center resurrection in the cloud. Weigh your options carefully as more options usually equals higher cost.
That said, it becomes very clear as to what must be part of a DR solution at a minimum:
The ability to automatically backup critical systems and data.
The ability to quickly recover from a disaster, with minimal user interaction.
Flexible recovery options, such as restoring a single application or the whole infrastructure.
Easily understood billing structure.
Backup Target Options.
While the above outlined must-haves give a basic indication of what a DRaaS solution should do, SMBs should not just stop there to determine what service to choose. With that in mind, we created a checklist that should make the selection process a little easier:
Armed with the above checklist, SMB owners should be able to make short work of selecting a DRaaS provider that meets their needs.
Backup: (Which backup options/capabilities are offered)
• Does the DraaS solution create local backups as well as cloud-based backups?
• Does the DraaS solution incorporate file size management to reduce storage needs?
• What applications, operating systems, and databases are directly supported?
• How frequently is the data backed-up or synchronized?
Recovery: (What happens if there is an onsite failure)
• How long does it take to recover an application? Server? Data?
• Will the DraaS support a self-service model?
• How complex is it to move from a backup to a live state?
• Does the DraaS offer a local appliance and address network change issues?
Failure-State: (How does the temporary recovery solution work)
• What level of performance can be expected when failed applications are hosted in the cloud?
• What architecture is used by the host to guarantee availability?
• What is the maximum number of VMs the DRaaS supports?
Failback: (What happens when on-site capabilities return to normal)
• Are there time limits on how long the provider will host the recovery environment?
• Are there additional charges, penalties, or other costs associated with long-term hosting?
• How does the provider manage restoration/failback?
• Is there a danger of data loss during failback?
• Does the failback process introduce downtime?
Featured Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service Solution Reviews:
Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Review
Editors' Choice
$16.00 MSRP
Bottom Line: Great choice for protecting a variety of critical workloads on both Hyper-V and VMware. Pricing is competitive for basic storage plus the failover capability. Tight integration with System C...
Quorum onQ Hybrid Cloud Solution Review
$750.00 MSRP
Bottom Line: A very capable choice for businesses that need on-site (or multi-site) disaster recovery (DR) and backup, with the option for off-site protection, combined with the ability to store and exec...
Zerto Virtual Replication Review
$745.00 MSRP
Bottom Line: Zerto Virtual Replication is a powerful business continuity solution, though it has the potential to get expensive. It also lacks the ability to protect non-virtualized network resources, wh...
Zetta Backup and Recovery Review
$175.00 MSRP
Bottom Line: Zetta Backup and Recovery offers a refreshingly fast and powerful option for true disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) at the right price. While the cloud failover component is unpolished ...
Carbonite Cloud Backup Review
$269.99 MSRP
Bottom Line: Carbonite Cloud Backup excels as an easy-to-use backup solution for small businesses, but offers no help beyond data recovery in a true disaster scenario.
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