Effective Disaster Recovery as a Service -

It's Key Benefits | Netmagic

Description: Maturing DRaaS is emerging model fororganizations that wish to outsource DR systems. This blogby Nilesh from Netmagic talk about DRaaS or Cloud-basedDR that offers businesses, improved efficiencies, reducedcost & can minimize the recovery time after a failure.

Keyword: Improved DRaaS Efficiencies, Cloud-basedDisaster Recovery , Maturing DRaaS, Cloud based DR,DRaaS Key Benefits article

Disasters such as floods and terrorist attacks have madeIndian businesses take disaster recovery (DR) and

protection of critical business data on priority. More sotoday, they understand the perils of not having businesscontinuity (BCP) strategy in place. They understand theoperational and financial impact of disruption to theirbusiness systems.

Having said that, there are some who consider DR, a good-to-have! According to IDC report on BCP and DR, over 90%of companies who have been impacted by data loss due todisasters or other reasons fail to sustain their business.These businesses are looking at DR from a regulatoryperspective - do what is absolutely required by law to runthe business.

The Financial Implications

Data loss and downtime due to failure of business systemscost business heavily when they do not have a DR plan inplace. Minor outages also could mean significant losses tothe business and given unpredictable economic climate oftoday, this could mean, business failure.

Maturing DRaaS Offers Improved Efficiencies, LoweredComplexities and Reduced Cost

Cloud-based Disaster Recovery (DR) are proving to be a de-facto for businesses as it offers improved efficiencies,reduced cost and fast maturing to lower complexities, saysNilesh Rane of Netmagic Solutions

Effective Disaster Recovery as a Service- It's Key Benefits | Netmagic

The Legal Implications

One of the issues of not having a robust DR plan in placecan arise from regulatory compliance. Increasinglybusinesses have to comply with ever-growing stringentregulatory environment to successfully do business. Recentlaws require organizations to protect and make available allsensitive data pertaining to the business.

Prevention is the key to disaster recovery. Businesses relyon Disaster Recovery (DR) services to prevent eithermanmade or natural disasters from causing expensiveservice disruptions.

Unfortunately, current DR services come either at very highcost, or with weak guarantees about the amount of data lostor time required to restart operation after a failure.

With the advent of cloud computing and virtualization thereare emerging model of delivering Disaster Recovery as aService(DRaaS) or DR as a cloud service or DR on demand.DRaaS as a model is gaining popularity among enterprisesmainly due to its pay-as-you-go pricing model that canlower costs, and use of automated virtual platforms that canminimize the recovery time after a failure.

The most alluring of the benefits of these emerging modelsis that a cloud based DR service may only need a smallshare of resources to synchronize state from the primary siteto the cloud. The full amount of resources required to run theapplication only needs to be provisioned (and paid for) if adisaster actually happens. This can dramatically reduce therecovery time after a failure, which is a key component inenabling business continuity.

A key challenge in providing a DR Service is to supportBusiness Continuity (BC), allowing applications to rapidlycome back online after a failure occurs. By minimizing therecovery time and the data lost due to disaster, a DR Servicecan also provide business continuity.

Cloud platforms can provide low cost DR services and canbe optimized to minimize data loss and recovery time inorder to provide both efficient disaster recovery and

business continuity.

DRaaS or Cloud based Disaster Recovery (DR)

In a computing requirement where peak resource demand ismuch higher than the average demand, cloud offerssubstantial cost benefits. Even for the DR environment, thecloud can be used to cheaply maintain the state of anapplication using low cost resources under ordinaryoperating conditions. Only after a disaster occurs, a cloudbased DR Service pays for the more powerful -andexpensive - resources required to run the full application.

The best part if that these resources can be provisioned in amatter of seconds or minutes. In contrast, an enterpriseusing its own private resources for DR must always haveservers available to meet the resource needs of the fulldisaster case, resulting in a much higher cost during normaloperation.

Cloud based DR can be an attractive alternative forcompanies that are strapped for IT resources because theusage-based cost of cloud services is well suited for DRwhere the secondary infrastructure is parked and idling mostof the time. Having DR sites in the cloud reduces the need

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Key Components of an Effective DR Service

Recovery Point Objective (RPO): Amount of tolerable dataloss: The RPO of DR system represents the point in time ofthe most recent backup prior to any failure.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO): Acceptable systemdowntime: Includes the time to detect the failure, prepareany required servers in the backup site (virtual or physical),initialize the failed application, and perform the networkreconfiguration required to reroute requests from the originalsite to the backup site so the application can be used.Having a very low RTO can enable business continuity,allowing an application to seamlessly continue operatingdespite a site wide disaster.

Performance: Impact on normal operation and afterrecovery: For a DR service to be useful, it must have aminimal impact on the performance of each applicationbeing protected under failure-free operation.

Consistency: Accuracy of application data and outputs:The DR service must ensure that post failure, the applicationcan be restored to a consistent state.

Geographic Separation: SR site should not be impactedby the same disaster: It is important that the primary andbackup sites are geographically separated in order to ensurethat a single disaster will not impact both sites.

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for data center space, IT infrastructure and IT resources,which leads to significant cost reductions, enabling smallercompanies to deploy disaster recovery options that werepreviously only found in larger enterprises.

Key Elements of DRaaS

An ideal cloud-based DR Service provides the following keyelements:

� Consideration of RPO: All protected systems arereplicated frequently by incremental backups orsnapshots at intervals set by the user depending on ananalysis of business requirements - according torecovery point objectives (RPO)

� Fast and SLA-based: There is no compromise when itcomes to cloud-based back up recovery or DR Service.It is SLA-based, negotiated up front with the providerand the customer pays for the SLA.

� Completely optimized: Optimization of speed andavailability between the customer and the cloud serversare done to enable full data mobility at reducedbandwidth, storage and thus cost.

� Flexibility: Self-service portal that helps user or gives theuser flexibility to choose which disk, files, systems theywant to recover/backup.

� Data protection: Ensuring data integrity is an importantaspect of a successful DR plan. There must be anautomated validation process to allow customers tocheck their data at any time. DR drill will demonstrate theviability of the DR plan.

DRaaS Benefits

Cloud based DR offers myriad benefits to organizations.Some of the key ones are:

� The cloud's pay-as-you go pricing model significantlylowers costs due to the different level of resourcesrequired before and during a disaster.

� Cloud resources can quickly be added with finegranularity and have costs that scale smoothly withoutrequiring large upfront investments.

� The cloud platform manages and maintains the DRservers and storage devices, lowering IT costs andreducing the impact of failures at the disaster site. ?Thebenefits of virtualization, while not necessarily specific tocloud platforms, still provide important features fordisaster recovery:

� VM startup can be easily automated, lowering recoverytimes after a disaster.

� Flexible cloud resources enable the switch between lowcost and more powerful servers as needed

� The backup data is kept in a geographically separatelocation

� The cost and difficulty of working with "recovered" data

is eliminated� Virtualization eliminates hardware dependencies,

potentially lowering hardware requirements ?at thebackup site.

� Application agnostic state replication software can berun outside of the VM, treating it as a ?black box. ?Thesecharacteristics can simplify the replication anddeployment of resources in a cloud DR site, and enablebusiness continuity by reducing recovery times.

DRaaS versus Traditional DR

The process of devising the right DR plan starts withidentifying and prioritizing applications, services and databased on amount of downtime acceptable before there is asignificant business impact. DR approach will depend onthis priority and required recovery time objectives (RTOs).

With applications identified and prioritized, and RTOsdefined, the organization can then determine the best andmost cost-effective methods of achieving the RTOs (byapplication and service). A combination of cost and recoveryobjectives drives different levels of disaster recovery.

A comparison between DRaaS and traditional DR approachwill make it easy to decide the way forward for your right DRplan.

Are You Ready for DRaaS?

If you are evaluating DRaaS, there are some aspects whicha company should check internally.

� First of all, the most important question to ask yourself isif your data security policy in compliance with regulatoryrequirements?

� Assess total cost of ownership (TCO) of having adedicated DR so that a comparative study can be doneto evaluate the benefits

� Are your systems and processes in line to takeadvantage of cloud benefits or will you need furtherinvestments to upgrade to a cloud-ready environment?

After evaluating internally, there are considerations at theservice provider side that you must check.

� Check the portfolio of services being offered by thevendor

� Check the competency of the service provider to bringthe company's systems to at least a warm state ofoperations, should the DR be invoked

� Is the service provider ready to work hand in hand tocreate and implement the DR blueprint?

Effective Disaster Recovery as a Service- It's Key Benefits | Netmagic

Effective Disaster Recovery as a Service- It's Key Benefits | Netmagic

Deciding the service level agreements (SLAs):

� Lead time to allocate the minimum required resources,should DR be invoked

� Lead time to scale up resources to the defined (or full)level

� Duration for which such resources will be retained on adedicated basis for the company

� Additional fees for occupancy beyond the pre-definedperiod

� Additional facilities such as conference rooms and videoconferencing

� Capability to provide additional hardware as and when

needed � Parameters related to work area recovery can also be

included if such services are used

DRaaS is emerging and maturing for organizations that wishto control their own infrastructure but not maintain thedisaster recovery systems themselves. The cloud'sadvantages in elasticity and cost-reduction are significantbenefits in a disaster recovery scenario, and serviceofferings allow organizations to outsource portions ofcontingency planning to partners with expertise in the area.

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marketing@netmagicsolutions.com www.netmagicsolutions.com1800 103 3130

About Netmagic Solutions (An NTT Communications Company)

Netmagic, an NTT Communications company, is India’s leading Managed Hosting and Cloud Service Provider, with 8 carrier-neutral, state-of-the-art datacenters across the country. Established in 1998, Netmagic has been a pioneer in the Indian IT Infrastructure services space as it was the first to launch services such as cloud computing, managed security, Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service and software-defined storage. An IT Infrastructure Partner to more than 1400 enterprises globally, Netmagic, also delivers Remote Infrastructure Management services to NTT Communications’ customers across Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific region. Netmagic is the recipient of several industry accolades and was recently chosen by India’s CIO community as the best service provider of Datacenter Managed Services and Cloud services, at the CIO Choice 2015 Awards.NTT Communications has subsidiaries and offices in 43 countries / regions, with over 21,600 employees worldwide. It had total operating revenues of 1230bilion JPY for year ending March 31, 2014 and has infrastructure worldwide, including leading global tier-1 IP network, the Arcstar Universal One™ VPN network reaching 196 countries/regions, and 130 secure datacenters.

NTT Communications is a part of NTT Corporation, Japan – one of world’s largest telecommunications companies and ranked 53 on Fortune Global 500 list (2014).

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About NTT Communications Corporation

NTT Communications provides consultancy, architecture, security and cloud services to optimize the information and communications technology (ICT) environments of enterprises. These offerings are backed by the company’s worldwide infrastructure, including leading global tier-1 IP network, Arcstar Universal One™ VPN network reaching 196 countries/regions, and over 150 secure data centers. NTT Communications’ solutions leverage the global resources of NTT Group companies including Dimension Data, NTT DOCOMO and NTT DATA