4 Essentials For MSPs To Deliver True DR-As-A-Service
By Eddie Tsiao, Vice President of Engineering, Zetta.net
The fear of how an unexpected event may impact employee productivity, customer responsiveness, and revenue generation has many enterprises — small and large — looking for simple, cost effective solutions to protect their data in the event of a disaster. In any industry where downtime means the loss of money, disaster recovery (DR) is a critical need.
For managed services providers (MSPs), this creates a compelling opportunity to deliver new DR options to support customer requirements. In fact, according to a recent Enterprise Strategy Group spending intentions study, “improving data backup and recovery” was a top spending priority for IT organizations, with 66 percent of the spend going to cloud computing services.
One way to capitalize on the increasing cloud spend and address your customers’ need to access their systems and applications in the event of a major disaster from the cloud is to add a DR-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solution to your portfolio. Current DRaaS options available are:
- Single File System: Many solutions offer single-file data recovery
- Appliance-Based: These solutions require an appliance to restore server images from the cloud
- Virtual Only: Others can effectively support virtual servers, but don’t include support for physical servers, critical to many of today’s businesses
- Custom-Built DRaaS: The only comprehensive DRaaS option — that supports both physical and virtual servers — has been traditionally custom-built enterprise solutions that are extremely complex and costly, requiring hours of professional services to implement. That is, until now.
Today there is a new breed of true cloud-based DRaaS solutions that offer robust performance and features without the high implementation cost. When considering a DRaaS solution, it’s important to consider the following four essential features for it to be truly effective:
- Spin Up Physical And Virtual Servers And Applications In The Cloud. When selecting a DRaaS solution, most customers need to consider options that will run both their physical and virtual servers and applications from the cloud without interruption to workflow, to continue business as usual following a larger site disaster.
- Offer Direct-To-Cloud DRaaS — Without An Appliance. Appliances can be a major pitfall in the recovery process and can often cost customers valuable time waiting for replacement appliances to be delivered. Recovery in the event of a disaster should be fast, without complexity of an appliance or expending costly downtime.
- Be Affordable. It has long been thought that DRaaS is a luxury that only larger enterprises can afford and can only be implemented for the most critical applications and workloads. Now, with the simplicity of a direct-to-cloud DRaaS solution, MSPs can offer a premium service that can easily protect all their customers’ applications and workloads efficiently and cost effectively.
- Make It Current. Recovering from a disaster isn’t valuable if you aren’t able to recover the most current set of your customer’s data. Be sure that the DRaaS solution you rely on has access to the most recently backed up data so that your recovery is not only quick and affordable, but useful as well.
By offering a direct-to-cloud DRaaS solution, MSPs can provide an easy to deploy disaster-ready solution at a price SMEs can afford which can result in more business and higher revenue.
Eddie Tsiao is vice president of engineering for Zetta.net and an expert in cloud-based data protection and email security.