A fairly recent addition to the endless alphabet soup of acronyms in the Information Technology Solutions world is “DRaaS.” Although it may be one of the many ever-so-enjoyable “. . . as a Service” variants, this one is well worth exploring. Disaster Recovery is a very important component of any Business Continuity Plan to protect mission-critical systems, applications, and irreplaceable data. Starting and maintaining all of these things in the first place is hard enough; planning out how to keep production moving in the event it all stops can be an extremely daunting task. Examples of some of the considerations that must be taken include physical location, recovery time, and consistency of all replicated components. That’s why trusting a partner to implement a complete and cohesive DRaaS strategy for your business can relieve much of the headache associated with this planning! LightEdge offers all of the pieces needed to ensure a successful recovery from any disaster event; let’s take a look at some of those services:
Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability
The first step to a complete Disaster Recovery Strategy is a robust Data Protection strategy. Ensuring Data is available regardless of what might happen is the key here. LightEdge offers both traditional file-level backups as well as image-level backups of entire VMs. We will even backup servers located outside of our data centers. The benefits of trusting us to take care of your Data Protection are extensive, from guarding against everyday mistakes such as accidental file-deletion to ensuring recovery or analysis of data weeks, months, or even years down the road. Time- and cost-savings include eliminating the need for capacity planning, reducing the maintenance load on your team, and keeping the backups secure in our compliant facilities both locally and/or at one of our remote sites.
VM Replication: Oh the Places You’ll Go
Once availability of underlying Data is guaranteed, the next step is ensuring VMs are ready for use at any time. By leveraging our partnerships with Veeam, Zerto, and Vision Systems, LightEdge is able to offer both point-in-time and near-real-time replication of your VMs to a remote environment or even locally if desired. This piece of the DR puzzle can allow your systems to digitally traverse hundreds of miles within a few minutes to a new safe location should the worst come to pass, allowing business to resume seamlessly in a completely different city and state!
Workplace Recovery: The Man Behind the Curtain
Perhaps the most boutique solution discussed thus far, Workplace Recovery ensures the most important component of any business – the humans – are able to land at an alternative worksite if they are unable to work where they are. We have suites at and near our DataCenters allowing for a complete restoration of productivity even if your place of business ceases to exist; we’ll even make special arrangements for long-term parking of RVs if needed!
Runbook Design: Tying it All Together
Completing the full DRaaS picture, a Runbook is the plan stitching together all of the various pieces of Disaster Recovery, the Bible of what should happen and when for your business. LightEdge will soon offer assistance designing and testing the runbook for implementing any pieces of your Business Continuity Plan under our auspices. Our experts will take a cohesive look at your systems and plan out the best way to ensure your business never stops!
Hopefully this tour into DRaaS has helped to dispel some of the fog around another acronym. If you’re interested in learning more, we would love to set up a time to talk about any challenges your company may be facing. Our team of experts is waiting to answer your questions and put a plan in place before disaster strikes.
