Disaster recovery (DR) plans are critical for any company that relies on digital infrastructure and data. Hint: that’s you! Unplanned outages can lead to a poor customer experience, compromised or lost customer data, and significant revenue losses.
Fortunately, DR plans backed by proven solutions can enable business continuity, maintain compliance, and enhance security. As part of their DR plans, many businesses turn to Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) delivered by a managed services provider (MSP) that can offer advanced technology, expert support, and cost-effective pricing. Let’s explore how DRaaS can help your business weather disasters as part of a strong DR plan.
Build a Strong DR Strategy
Before you begin sourcing DR solutions, you must create an effective DR plan. Follow these steps to get started:
1. Conduct a risk assessment and Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to identify critical assets and potential threats to your business, including natural disasters, cyberattacks, and systems failure.
2. Define Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), which are the maximum acceptable downtime (e.g., 2 hours) and maximum amount of acceptable data loss (e.g., 4 hours’ worth of data), respectively.
3. Specify procedures, roles, and responsibilities that employees must follow during a disaster event.
4. Create a communications plan to keep employees, partners, and customers informed during disasters.
5. Choose right-fit DR solutions that include backup, redundancy, and vital cloud-based functions your business needs.
6. Ensure compliance with industry regulations like HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI-DSS.
7. Train staff—particularly your IT team—on the relevant tech and DR procedures they must know to execute your DR plan properly.
8. Test and update the DR plan regularly to ensure it’s current and still effective in meeting your DR goals.
Why Build DRaaS Into Your DR Plan
DR solutions have the potential to prevent revenue losses to your business if it suffers from a natural or manmade disaster. However, DR solutions themselves can be costly, especially if you implement and manage them on your own. As an alternative, consider DRaaS, which offers cloud-based access to an MSP’s DR services, as a centerpiece of your DR plan.
DRaaS offers many benefits:
- Cutting-Edge Tech – MSPs leverage advanced, cutting-edge technology to deliver DRaaS. As a subscriber, you get access to state-of-the-art systems without significant time and resources spent researching, sourcing, and coordinating with potential vendors.
- Pay-as-You-Go Model – With DRaaS, your business avoids upfront investments in hardware and complex software integrations, instead leveraging the MSP’s solution through a subscription service model.
- Scalability – Because it’s delivered as a service, DRaaS offers your business predictable costs and the flexibility to upgrade or downgrade services in response to business fluctuations.
- Expert Support – MSP-delivered DRaaS comes with expert, 24/7/365 support backed by technicians and engineers trained on your specific solution, so problems are resolved promptly with minimal downtime.
- Built-in Security – MSPs not only provide DRaaS but are also compliant with cybersecurity frameworks to ensure your operations aren’t compromised when using their services.
Disaster Recovery Made Easy
To support your DR needs, Cox Business offers managed DRaaS through RapidScale, a Cox Business company. Our managed DRaaS solution simplifies DR by replacing multiple legacy tools with one always-on solution for disaster recovery, backup, and cloud mobility. Additionally, Cox Business DRaaS protects your on-premises workloads, as well as hybrid and multi-cloud environments, while achieving RPOs as fast as a few seconds and RTOs of just minutes.
