DRaaS: Do You Need to Re-think Your Advice To Customers?

Not every channel partner wants to be an MSP or CSP. But, even if partners aren’t offering DRaaS many customers still have concerns when it comes to disaster recovery. After all, not a week goes by without an outage, attack, natural disaster or human error story. After an outage many customers are still reverting to backups from the night before, but technology is moving fast and there are more modern solutions available to ensure customers can guarantee business continuity.

Backups are done nightly so as not to impair IT performance and so if the file a user creates today is lost, deleted, corrupted or infected their only choice is to start again. As outdated as the above scenario already sounds this is the situation for most businesses. This is not only massively frustrating to staff already under increasing pressure to be more productive, it is also a shaky data recovery plan. If the whole company were to lose its files, having to revert to a 24hr old backup would be time intensive and costly. This is where channel partners are invaluable when it comes to helping customers with their DR strategy.

Advanced DR

Due to the advances in technology there is now a new approach, a new reality. What if customers could go back to the file version seconds before it was infected or corrupted? By choosing a continuously protected system, customers can recover to specific points in time, every few seconds for up to 30 days previously. Uninterrupted, continuous DR utilises compressed journaling of the changed blocks from the protected VMs, to maintain a granularity of the data in increments of seconds up to the past month. This enables point in time recovery with ability to rewind data back in time, to recover from corruptions, deletions or even system wide disruptions due to ransomware or system upgrade errors. This is better than backup: this is IT resilience evolved.

Traditional recovery methods only allow file system objects to be restored from nightly, infrequent backups, which can result in significant data loss for customers and subsequent rework that impacts productivity. Furthermore, these methods incur a significant performance, storage and management overhead of the production data to minimise impact. With uninterrupted DR capabilities, this overhead and complexity are removed as data is continuously replicated with no snapshots, and no impact to production or the performance of the protected virtual machines.

Restoring files is one of, if not the most, frequent datacentre support request customers put forward. But due to the advances in DR, the channel can now guide customers on the ability to achieve IT resilience and IT admins will be able to answer “Yes, we can restore your data from the seconds before it was lost”.

In addition, to offering a more satisfactory end user experience, the channel now has the tools to persuade business leaders. For the business, this level of data recovery gives them greater confidence in providing data restoration from SAP, SQL, Oracle as well as user data in home folder and file shares; crucial for the modern, collaborative workforce.

Downtime is not simply an annoyance; it can cause a detrimental impact to the company’s brand reputation as well as having a huge financial impact. The financial impact can vary depending on the nature of the business, but Gartner typically cites $5,600 per minute, which extrapolates to well over $300K per hour. That is why every second counts. Equally, for customers in highly regulated industries that require a long retention of data, such as healthcare and the financial services, this level of IT resilience and granularity helps them easily exceed compliance requirements, whilst also providing better experiences for their customers too.

So, when it comes to advising customers on how to stay competitive, productive and maintain IT resilience, the future is not in backup. It is being able to go back in time to the second before the file was lost, deleted or infected. In the modern world where hackers, viruses and ever-mutating malware are the norm, getting access to a 12hr old backup will soon be a thing of that past.

Peter Godden is VP for EMEA at Zerto