How Disaster Recovery Services Affect DR site Choice and Business Uptime

June 19, 2019

According to a recent Statista survey, the average hourly downtime cost of critical enterprise servers is nearly $400,000 U.S. dollars. That becomes even more dire since today’s disaster recovery services are more about business data recovery from the increasingly common cyber-attacks internal bad actors and human errors rather than natural disasters. When you add in events such as power, IT hardware, and network failures, questions arise as to the importance of DR site choices.

Data center disaster recovery site choices in the cloud era are just as important as they have ever been, but for several different reasons. Network architectures are complex webs in a business landscape where IoT and the distributed enterprise are ubiquitous. Both the distributed enterprise and IoT data requires fast and effective recovery for geographically dispersed branches and thousands of sensors beyond the network edge, which is no simple feat.

Since most incidents that require the use of business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) are man-made rather than natural disasters, greater distances between the DR site can be a moot point. Regardless of the downtime cause, enterprises and SMBs will likely need an offsite environment for personnel to work in conjunction with an ability to work remotely and still have access to application and workload resources.

Uninterrupted data transmission and access during all forms of network downtime will require detailed DR planning. In most of these cases where a physical recovery site is not needed as with a mobile-enabled workforce, cloud disaster recovery may be the ideal scenario.

In many varied cases over time, enterprises may need a combination of these options via comprehensive disaster recovery service providers. This will enable most businesses to have options for ideal variable distance between main work sites (where business information is obtained and used) and a disaster recovery site (where business information is replicated for restoration purposes and work can be performed in the event of catastrophe).

Large companies no longer see an acceptable return on investment (ROI) and acceptable total costs of ownership (TOC) for building and managing their own data centers or disaster recovery sites. In both cases, cost for power, management, land use and operating expenses for two or more sites can be hard to justify. Many are joining SMBs in finding data center providers that offer extensive data center disaster recovery services. These provider can deliver greater consistency, scalability, and options for technical and other types of support such as the following:

Hardened infrastructure
Redundancy options
In-house technical sophistication and support for hardware/software installations and maintenance
Space planning and workstations that can accommodate both front and back office in the case of an unexpected disaster
Ability to meet various regulatory compliance standards for data security
Support for on-premises, private/public cloud, multi-cloud, and colocation workloads
Broad interconnectivity choices, and much more

The complexity of data access and transmission needs for an enterprise requires access to a multi-cloud platform that provides interconnection to all major cloud providers to meet varied disaster recovery needs. With the disappearing network edge and its relationship to IoT and disaster recovery options, many businesses will need to encompass both private and public cloud strategies.

Bandwidth and latency are two factors that can have definite impact on DR site choices so having options in locations that can mirror real-time access are vital to some workloads. The ability to have access to a global network of data centers will open the possibilities that will mitigate potential latency needs. This, along with multicloud provider access as part of comprehensive disaster recovery services, can make access, uptime, bandwidth, and latency issues a non-starter.