Having an IT Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy is vital today, whether for compliance or to ensure if anything does happen, then your business will still be able to operate.
Yet many businesses still don’t have a DR plan or have a weak DR strategy due to the associated time involved.
We ensure our IT support clients have a disaster recovery plan in place by organising the most suitable DR strategy to fit with their business requirements. This means we know that if anything happens we can have them back up and running quickly and also means that they know they have a DR plan in place with little input and no maintenance on their part.
We use Azure Site Recovery and wanted to outline the ten best features Azure Site Recovery brings to Disaster Recovery planning:
1. Hybrid cloud ready
Azure Site recovery is built for the hybrid cloud for comprehensive protection for virtual and physical servers.
2. Cost effective
There are no upfront costs and no terminations fees and you only pay for what you’re using so you get the greatest value. You do not need to juggle storage and budget for hardware upgrades, because if you need extra you can simply add it with a few clicks instantly. As it is billed as one monthly payment, if you reduce your requirements your costs will immediately go down the next month.
3. Pre-defined multi-tiered start-up
You can control and set your start-up sequence in a multi-tiered approach so that the most critical systems are recovered first and then decreasing in importance. This means that if you do need to recover from a disaster, the systems will return in order of priority that you have determined.
4. Quick replication and recovery
Perhaps one of the most important aspects of a disaster recovery plan is ensuring that you can quickly recover. The longer it takes to recover the more downtime and cost to the business. Azure Site Recovery will automatically orchestrate the process to restore services quickly using your pre-determined sequence (above) so you can be working again in no time.
5. Continuous monitoring
Azure Site Recovery continually monitors the health and status of your protected instances and can identify any issues via email notifications to allow constant and automated protection.
6. Encryption
With Azure, all communication to and from is encrypted in transit and you can also select to have your data encrypted at rest.
7. Scale up
Azure Site Recovery is highly scalable and allows businesses to very quickly add on any additional requirements. This is extremely useful to allow a future-proof solution, as you are not tied down to anything and can quickly add and remove storage and requirements as needed. This makes costs more accurate as you pay for what you use and you also know that you can quickly adapt to any business changes.
8. Test it
A great benefit to Site Recovery is the ability to test your disaster plan without any impact to your environments. Being able to effectively test, means you have the peace of mind that you know how it will work and can practice and improve through testing.
9. Make it Opex spend
As Azure Site Recovery is billed by monthly subscription payments your DR spend can be moved from potential Capex spend into Opex spend for more predictable budgeting and planning – while also keeping Finance happy!
10. 99.9% SLA
All of Microsoft’s Azure services come with a 99.9% financially-backed guarantee from Microsoft to ensure a guaranteed uptime of services.