Nowadays, disaster recovery starts with understanding your workload and application priorities, and any changes to your infrastructure. It means taking a whole-of-business view that considers business critical information availability and sets the recovery speeds and data loss timeframes.

Don’t just replicate everything. Approach disaster recovery selectively to ensure business continuity and value for money.

The rapid advance of cloud computing and the increase in use of virtualisation software have made on-premises failover data centres less important, and the capital investment less attractive.

Today the focus is on Recovery as a Service (RaaS), a cloud based replication and recovery offer. With a RaaS approach you pay only for what you need and use, rather than shelling out for ‘always-on’ disaster recovery capabilities. It’s a cost-effective approach to managing your risks, without breaking the bank, enabling you to start small and build or start big and reduce.

What we’re talking about here is a real step forward over traditional data synchronisation and backup/restore offerings, such as vendor specific storage based replication, sensitive hypervisor level snapshot based replication and complex application level replication.

To take advantage of this new IT frontier, the challenge is to find the right balance between the cost of your disaster recovery solution and the risks – especially around your critical applications.

The reality is that disaster recovery shouldn’t be a ‘one size fits all’ approach. Each organisation’s individual disaster recovery solution has to be based upon application, workload and availability needs on a day-to-day basis as well as in case of disaster. Before embarking on a disaster recovery solution, look at the criticality of your applications and factor in your recovery point and recovery time objectives.

For many organisations, part of getting it right will be selecting a reliable service provider and negotiating appropriate service level agreements. Depending on the skills and expertise of your internal resources, you may need the guidance of a trusted, experienced adviser to help assess and choose the right integrated disaster recovery solution for your business. Make sure your adviser stays on board to co-ordinate your failover and failback tests, and to recover mission critical IT applications and services in the event of a disaster. Don’t forget to update your disaster recovery plans on an ongoing basis; keeping them aligned to your changing business needs.

Our CTO, Damien Pedersen, has explored and assessed various RaaS options coming onto the market. He recommends a disaster recovery solution – which we call the Envisian RaaS – that combines today’s most reliable tools, including a hypervisor-level replication platform, with Envisian consulting and management expertise.

We chose our replication and recovery partner based on the flexibility, versatility and rapid recovery of their offer. We like that it is storage and hypervisor agnostic, easy to deploy, geographically diverse and has a built-in testing regime. However, it is the guidance of our expertly skilled consultants that will be of immense benefit to our clients.

We start by helping you develop or evolve your disaster recovery plan, then tailor a virtual recovery site to meet those needs. You can choose to replicate part of, or all of your virtualised environment and we help you develop your run-book, to ensure you reduce risk without busting your budget. And we enable you to fully test the recovery plan in a secure sandboxed environment. Importantly, we remain as your first point of call for ongoing advice and support.

Should the unthinkable happen, you will have in place a pre-planned methodology backed up with technical assistance and support from Envisian –from start to finish – enabling the rapid recovery of vital systems and applications.