What Is Azure Site Recovery? Business outages are caused by natural events and operational failures. Organizations need a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy that keeps apps and data safe and available during both planned and unplanned downtime. It also needs to be able to recover those apps and data to normal working conditions as soon as possible. Azure Site Recovery meets these needs through the following avenues: Simple, automated protection and disaster recovery in the cloud Orchestrated disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) Replication and disaster recovery to Azure Continuous health monitoring with Site Recovery Why Site Recovery? There are a host of reasons why Azure Site Recovery is an excellent option for BCDR, including recovery in the cloud, resiliency, testing, flexible failover, and continuous monitoring. Disaster Recovery in the Cloud Replicate workloads running on VMs and physical servers to Azure, rather than to a secondary site. This eliminates the cost and complexity of maintaining a secondary data center. With Site Recovery, you have the ability to replicate any workload running on-premises, Hyper-V VMs, and Windows/Linux physical servers. Resilience Site Recovery orchestrates replication and failover, without intercepting application data. Replicated data is stored in Azure storage, with the resilience that provides. When failover occurs, Azure VMs are created based on the replicated data. Testing Without Disruption Azure Site Recovery allows you to easily run test failovers to support disaster recovery drills without affecting production environments. Rich Recovery Plans with Flexible Failover and Recovery Recovery plans allow modeling to customize failover and recovery of multi-tier applications spread over multiple VMs. Order groups within plans, and add scripts and manual actions. Recovery plans can be integrated with Azure automation runbooks. You can run planned failovers for expected outages with zero data loss, or be prepared for unplanned failovers with minimal data loss. Easily fail back to the primary site when it’s available again. Continuous Health Monitoring Site Recovery monitors the state of your protected instances continuously and remotely from Azure. Interested in learning more about how Azure Site Recovery can improve (or even become) your “plan for a rainy day”? Please contact us today to learn more about this exciting solution!
In the last three years, 96% of global IT decision-makers have experienced at least one outage. The average downtime following a ransomware attack is three weeks. And according to ITIC’s 2021 Hourly Cost of Downtime survey, 91% percent of mid-sized and large enterprises say just one hour of server downtime would cost them $300,000 or more—half of whom believe it would exceed $1M. Data is the lifeblood of any business. Without a reliable and robust disaster recovery plan in place, any unexpected disruption—whether from hardware failure, natural disaster, or a cyberattack—can result in data loss, prolonged downtime, crippling financial losses, and reputational damage. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) has emerged as one of the most effective and efficient approaches to disaster recovery in recent years. With the ability to back up all cloud data and applications in a managed data center, the pay-as-you-go cloud service model not only safeguards critical assets, but also ensures rapid restoration, minimizing the impact of disruptions on business operations. In essence, DRaaS simplifies disaster recovery, keeping your business resilient and operational in the face of adversity. Here are some steps you can take to ensure you’re harnessing your DRaaS solution’s full potential to bolster your disaster recovery strategy and protect your business: Prioritize your critical assets: Identify and prioritize your organization’s critical data, applications, and systems—and reassess regularly. Not everything requires the same level of protection. By focusing on what’s most important, you streamline your DRaaS strategy and allocate resources more effectively, ensuring the highest level of protection for your most crucial assets. Define clear RTOs and RPOs: To align your recovery efforts with your business goals and needs, clearly define your Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) based on the criticality of your assets. In doing so, you not only tailor your DRaaS solution to meet the specific recovery needs of your business, but you also ensure it is equipped to deliver the required levels of availability and data protection. Regularly test and validate: Conduct regular testing and validation of your DRaaS solution, including planned recovery drills and unexpected failover tests. By routinely putting your DRaaS plan to the test, you can proactively identify any potential weaknesses or gaps in your disaster recovery strategy and fine-tune it as needed. Incorporate automation and orchestration tools: Use automation and orchestration tools to simplify the failover and failback processes. When you automate these critical tasks, you can ensure swift response to disruptions, free of human error, to maintain business continuity. Continuously monitor and make improvements: Regularly review and improve your disaster recovery plan based on lessons learned from testing and real-world incidents. This iterative approach helps you stay proactive in identifying potential vulnerabilities and adapting your DRaaS strategy to evolving threats and business needs. Disaster recovery is a critical component of your business’s IT strategy. With a DRaaS approach that is well managed, you can solidify a resilient footing against disruptions, safeguard your critical assets, and ensure the continuity of your business operations in the face of what could otherwise be catastrophically damaging events. At ProCern, we can help you adopt a comprehensive DRaaS approach that protects your critical data and applications. With advanced expertise in Hewlett Packard Enterprises‘s backup, recovery, and ransomware protection capabilities, we’ll partner with you to ensure your business stays resilient and operational, even in the face of unexpected events. For more information, contact us here.