Beyond Disaster Recovery
You don't need an outage to see the value of a DRaaS solution
Business and IT leaders understand how vital disaster recovery (DR) is for their organizations. When a problem occurs, a good DR framework makes it possible to retrieve data and systems quickly ensuring your business stays up and running. Simply put, it reduces risk. But what if a DR solution could be used daily? What if Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) represents a new way to augment IT infrastructure rather than just help protect it? In fact, this is possible. The “as a service” approach to DR and business continuity is now mainstream, with spending on DRaaS solutions expected to hit $4 billion by 2021. By adopting this framework, you can use DRaaS in new ways. Let’s take a look at how you can maximize the value of your disaster recovery investment.
The “as a service” approach to DR and business continuity is
$4
billion
1
now mainstream, with spending on DRaaS solutions expected to hit $4 billion by 2021.
Disaster recovery is essential for protecting digital assets and keeping the business running under adversity. But it can also be used to extend IT resources for:
Every year, about 20% of middle market companies acquire other companies. When organizations merge or acquire other companies, one common result is combining redundant systems. For example, both firms would surely have human resources (HR) systems in place, but only one will ultimately be used by the new organization. This transition often includes moving valuable data from one system into another. IT teams can use DRaaS as a cost-effective way to add temporary capacity while making the transition, and help simplify and speed up the transition while keeping data in a controlled, secure environment.
2
Lower overall costs including capital outlay
Greater flexibility
Keeping in-transition data secure
DRaaS Environments Can Do Much More than DR
Benefits
Every year, about 20% of middle market companies acquire other companies.
20%
There’s a growing need to conduct testing within software development environments or work out bugs in a pre-production setting. In fact, DevOps adoption is growing at an annual rate of nearly 19%. This applies in a widenumber of common development practices across industries, and companies are finding it’s an expensive proposition to keep paying for new environments. Instead of purchasing more capacity from a cloud provider, it's possible to tap unused disaster recovery capacity to test software or systems. Then, once they’re working correctly, they can be connected to the regular enterprise IT environment. This practice can reduce the number of newly created environments needed. A recent industry study cites a customer that used DR technology to stand up development and testing environments as well as the data copies without the need for extensive hardware and software licenses. This cut total cost of ownership for the customer’s development and test environment by more than 68% over three years.
3
Lower costs, including capital outlay
Discovering a cost-saving alternative for testing and development
Reduced risk
4
DevOps adoption is growing at an annual rate of nearly 19%.
19%
There’s a growing need to conduct testing within software development environments or work out bugs in a pre-production setting. In fact, DevOps adoption is growing at an annual rate of nearly 19%. This applies in a wide
number of common development practices across industries, and companies are finding it’s an expensive proposition to keep paying for new environments.
Instead of purchasing more capacity from a cloud provider, it's possible to tap unused disaster recovery capacity to test software or systems. Then, once they’re working correctly, they can be connected to the regular enterprise IT environment. This practice can reduce the number of newly created environments needed.
A recent industry study cites a customer that used DR technology to stand up development and testing environments as well as the data copies without the need for extensive hardware and software licenses. This cut total cost of ownership for the customer’s development and test environment by more than 68% over three years.
Saving time and resources on IT infrastructure management
A major challenge for disaster recovery and business continuity is ensuring systems, components and software are always up to date and operating at maximum efficiency. Managing back-end infrastructure — servers, storage devices and more — can devour significant amounts of time, capital and other resources. This can draw time and resources away from more strategic tasks. A DRaaS framework can pay dividends by removing the burden of continually optimizing and updating systems. It can also fill-in expertise an organization doesn’t possess in-house and significantly lower capital investments. If an organization is looking to use its DR system for additional tasks such as managing in-transit data or software testing, this approach can also mean greater flexibility and agility. As organizations work to harness the power of digital systems, a DRaaS approach may make sense — and optimize dollars.
A DRaaS framework can pay dividends by removing the burden of continually optimizing and updating systems.
Optimized resources
Improved system performance
A major challenge for disaster recovery and business continuity is ensuring systems, components and software are always up to date and operating at maximum efficiency. Managing back-end infrastructure — servers, storage
devices and more — can devour significant amounts of time, capital and other resources. This can draw time and resources away from more strategic tasks.
6 Steps for Unlocking the Full Value of DR
Too many organizations approach disaster recovery as a check-box exercise or a means of meeting contractor requirements and regulatory standards. You can adopt a strategic framework for disaster recovery that amps up the value proposition by following these steps:
Build a business case.
Conduct strategic planning.
Design the network appropriately.
Understand how the new strategy changes things.
Address change management.
Ensure there’s alignment among groups.
5
6
Demonstrate how using the additional capabilities of DRaaS will benefit the organization through cost savings, efficiency gains, and other key metrics. For instance, with 97% of organizations practicing agile development methods, using disaster recovery for development and testing offers an opportunity to address delivery speed challenges and improve agile practices.
Map out how you want to use the disaster recovery framework to support additional tasks. Talk to different business groups and users, and look for opportunities to help them boost efficiencies and cut costs.
Understand where data will reside and how various network segments and nodes will be protected. This includes identifying where it’s necessary to establish isolated networks for conducting pre-production testing, or merging data during a merger or acquisition.
Because you’re co-mingling resources and possibly data, it’s critical to identify required changes in capacity and how they impact performance. You may need to provision resources differently, add security measures, and adjust network monitoring to reflect changes.
Any significant change to the way the network functions — including disaster recovery systems — translates into a need to keep engineers and systems administrators up to date. Change management may require new policies, new controls and training.
Different business and user groups within an organization often have competing interests. It’s important to balance expectations and needs when extending the value of DRaaS.
Want more value from your disaster recovery framework?
Visit www.flexential.com/contact-us
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service, July 2018 - https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3881865/magic-quadrant-for-disaster-recovery-as-a-service National Center for the Middle Market - https://www.middlemarketcenter.org/expert-perspectives/reasons-deal-making-in-middle-market-intensifying Allied Market Research - https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/DevOps-market CloudCover, Microsoft Azure Case Study: Development & Testing Environment CollabNet VersionOne, 13th Annual State of Agile™ Report, 2019 - https://www.stateofagile.com/
Source (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
