Azure Disaster Recovery Minimizes Downtime
“A DR site is unattainable to us due to the added cost, infrastructure, and management."
“Productivity and profits are greatly affected by system outages.”
“Our business cannot afford to take an outage.”
“Downtime is unacceptable. Period.”
These are some common statements we hear from our clients when Disaster Recovery (DR) is brought up, but most of them cringe when a quote comes across their desk that includes all systems required for a DR site. We at Avtex have priced out dedicated DR sites and systems four times within the last three years and found it was cost prohibitive based on the hardware, software, and support costs of those systems.
What if I told you DR was attainable, but at a fraction of the cost it would take to maintain an additional Data Center?
Well, our buddies over at Microsoft developed a service that is going to help us do exactly that: Azure Site Recovery (ASR). With ASR, we can replicate VMs (VMware or Hyper-V) along with physical servers to Azure where it sits dormant, like a sleeping bear, until something awful happens. And when that awful thing happens, Mr. Bear is going to wake up and start up SharePoint and SQL. He's going to make sure your files are accessible and your Outlook client can connect to Exchange. And he's going to make sure your corporate website is online and accessible to the world. Mr. Bear is keeping your SLA at 99.999% while your engineers are scrambling to get all on-prem systems back online, but way less stressed out because they know production systems are available. And we all know, a happy engineer is an efficient engineer.
Avtex DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) is an analogy for Mr. Bear. With this new offering, we are going to help your business stay true to your pre-existing SLAs, and save you money since you are only paying for storage and management while the servers are sitting dormant.
Part of this offering includes an assessment that will tell us what type and how many resources (i.e. VMs, storage, load balancers, etc.) will need to be provisioned in Azure. We will also be able to tell, based on available bandwidth and daily data change rate, what your obtainable RPO (Recovery Point Objective) will be for each server. Monthly test failovers are also included, which allows us to failover VMs into a segmented environment where you can log into and validate all services are functioning as expected. This is a really cool feature that will give both you and Avtex confidence that a legitimate failover won't uncover any unexpected surprises.
After a failover has occurred and on-prem systems are functional again, we reverse the procedure replicating any changes that occurred in the "cloud" back to on-prem. All of this happening while minimizing downtime.
Let us help you make DR less of a disaster with Avtex DRaaS.
If any of this sounds familiar and you'd be interested in engaging Avtex for a free DRaaS assessment, please reach out to your Avtex sales rep or sales@www.avtex.com.