Downtime is costly, and the process of getting up and running again can significantly strain IT resources. Moving to a disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) approach can take a lot of the pressure off, but only if you first have an understanding of your vulnerabilities and the threats that can bring your systems to a halt. Getting a handle on disaster recovery is essential, especially as outages become costlier and more businesses become data-center-dependent.

Cyber Crime Is Fastest Growing Cause Of Data Center Outage

A single data center outage today costs U.S. businesses more than $740,000 on average, up 38% since the Ponemon Institute first started tracking the metric back in 2010. And while issues such as UPS failures continue to be the number one cause of unplanned data center outages (accounting for 25% of all events), cybercrime is actually the fastest growing, rising from just 2% in 2016 to 22% today.

A single cyber attack, such as ransomware or distributed denial of service (DDoS), crystallizes the financial importance not only of protecting your organization from such attacks, but also recovering from them as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Before putting a disaster recovery plan in place; however, enterprises must first determine two key metrics:

• Recovery time objective (RTO): A function of the extent to which downtime disrupts normal operations and resulting revenue lost per unit of time measured in seconds, minutes, hours or days. For example, if the RTO for an application is an hour, it is fairly critical and requires a fast – and likely expensive – recovery approach (e.g., redundant data backup on external hard drives). An RTO of five days; however, is less critical, making a slower, less expensive recovery option (tape, offsite storage, etc.)the more cost-effective choice.
• Recovery point objective (RPO): The RPO is the age of the files that must be recovered from backups for normal operations to resume. Expressed in time (going back into the past) from the point of failure, RPO is specified in seconds, minutes, hours or days. Once calculated, it is used to determine the optimal frequency for backups. For example, an RPO of an hour means the application is critical and backups must be made at least once an hour. An RPO of five days; on the other hand, requires backups be performed every 120 hours, which is a far less taxing regimen.

DRaaS Is Achievable and Affordable In Face of Downtime

Calculating the RTO and RPO upfront brings certainty to the entire disaster recovery planning process. Unfortunately, this certainty can also quickly highlight the cost of meeting all those RTOs and RPOs when a disaster strikes. This is where a comprehensive DRaaS option can come into play.

Armed with accurate, realistic RTO and RPO data, enterprises can more confidently determine the type and breadth of backup and restore capabilities they require. They can then more accurately vet their disaster recovery options, including DRaaS. And since DRaaS is billed on a subscription basis, it also brings certainty to the budgeting process, ensuring the DR plan is both achievable and affordable.

The cost of downtime is just too high to address disasters as they come. To business that depend on data to perform (what business doesn’t?), neteffect offers a range of DRaaS programs to give you peace of mind. Learn more.