Disaster Recovery
Choosing The Right DRaaS Provider And the Right Plan
04.20.17
Implementing an effective DRaaS solution is not a simple matter. Your provider will act as a trusted partner, ensuring not just that you have the most appropriate DR plan, but also that this plan is managed, maintained, monitored, adapted and scaled properly for years to come.
There are a few key points that you need to consider when choosing a DRaaS provider:
- Location: Where will your data reside? For compliance and regulatory reasons, it is commonly required for data to be kept in your own country. Also, many companies will often request both an on-site and an off-site recovery location. Your DRaaS provider should be able to accommodate this without requiring significant hardware investments.
- Performance: What Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives are outlined in your provider’s Service Level Agreements? Do they have a track record of meeting their SLAs? Also consider their responsiveness to customer questions and issues. If disaster strikes, are they available 24/7 to support you?
- Testing: Does the provider monitor your backups for consistency? Do they make it easy to perform periodic disaster recovery and failover testing? Do they offer backup verification? Backup testing is the most effective way to ensure your data and systems can be recovered consistently in an emergency.
- Specialized Experience: Make sure that your service provider is not just a generalist cloud service provider looking to get into the DRaaS business. You want them to have a proven track record in the space. You should also ensure that their support staff are well-trained and have all of the appropriate industry certifications.
- Pricing: What is their pricing structure? While it may appear low at first, some companies charge exorbitant fees to access your data when you need it most. And others have pricing tiers that can become problematic as you scale. Make sure pricing is completely transparent before agreeing to a contract, and ensure that costs won’t fluctuate unexpectedly as your requirements change in the future.
Breadth Of Capabilities: Whether you need to protect laptops, file servers, hypervisors or cloud applications, your DRaaS provider should offer a broad spectrum of services to cover all of your needs through a single provider. And as your needs change in the future, your DRaaS provider should adapt around your growing requirements. - Levels of Service: Different systems require different levels of availability and require different recovery features. Whether you want simple file recovery from a local appliance or near-instant off-site server failover to a remote facility, your provider should offer multiple recovery options in order to keep costs manageable.
By selecting the right cloud DRaaS provider, you can ensure total peace of mind in the face of any data disaster.
Contact us today for your customized solution.