How Data Centers Enable Disaster Recovery On-Demand
Disaster can strike a business without warning. While business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) planning isn’t new, many of the threats facing businesses and the way they respond to them are.
Cybersecurity threats like ransomware and DDoS attacks are more frequent, sophisticated, and damaging than ever, having increased by more than 40% in the last two years and cause an average of over 16 days of downtime. Meanwhile, conventional risks from natural disasters, network failure, or widespread power outages are also pervasive, impacting over 95% of enterprises and costing them up to $400,000 per hour of downtime.
As business operations threats continue to evolve, leaders worldwide and in every industry are beginning to rethink their approach to disaster recovery. They recognize that the traditional do-it-yourself DR is time-consuming, costly, and most importantly, ineffective. Instead, many are turning to outsourced options — Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to secure and protect their operations from harm and increase the velocity of getting back to business as usual when an interruption does occur.
A New DR Strategy for a New Time
The widespread adoption of colocation and cloud services means there are now more networks to configure, more endpoints to secure, and more mission-critical apps to support than ever. Yet, organizations must also contend with a cloud and cybersecurity skills gap that continues to widen each year.
Like software, infrastructure, and data solutions that have transitioned to a service model, DRaaS helps enterprises bolster their DR strategies while mostly avoiding the skills gap. DRaaS unburdens enterprise IT teams of day-to-day disaster recovery responsibilities, offering off-site DR capability that allows businesses to avoid:
- Costly 1:1 infrastructure duplication at secondary or multiple sites
- Staffing additional facilities with highly qualified and expensive personnel
- Unmanaged and untested failover of network, compute and storage devices
But choosing a DRaaS provider isn't something to take lightly. Both enterprise business and IT leaders should consult with various teams and departments to understand system and software contingencies and set clear, measurable standards of recovery. It’s also the right time to thoroughly evaluate a range of provider options, prioritizing those with the right people and facilities in place — especially their data centers.
CoreSite’s Central Role in DRaaS
Data centers play a pivotal role in any disaster recovery strategy but are the heart of a DRaaS solution. CoreSite’s modern, hyper-connected data centers feature a range of physical security measures to protect against intrusion, while also providing connectivity solutions that enable enterprises to scale and diversify their infrastructure for greater resilience and redundancy.
Each of the nearly two dozen CoreSite facilities are designed to prioritize physical security by providing features like man-traps, locking gates, and biometric scanners that make it extremely difficult for unauthorized personnel to access a business’s environment and cause any physical damage or interruption, either willfully or by accident.
More importantly, they’re designed to add layers of defense against potentially catastrophic information and data loss by eliminating data transfer over public internet — all within the confines of the secure data center walls.
In particular, CoreSite facilities offer organizations low-latency, highly secure direct cloud and private network connectivity from any CoreSite location in one of eight strategic edge markets to give companies more options for where to house their core infrastructure and use sites in other regions as secondary facilities. Enterprises can take advantage of simple fiber cross-connects to hundreds of cloud and network services providers that vary by location to dramatically expand their cloud footprints.
For example, enterprises that prefer the low latency and density in particular regions can colocate in hubs such as Los Angeles or New York for their mission-critical on-prem systems and house other applications or services in secondary and tertiary sites elsewhere, connected by a dedicated, secure network.
These connections also make it easier to directly connect with leading DRaaS providers who have sophisticated recovery service platforms, evaluation software and extensive experience with writing procedures, scheduling fail over tests and conducting Recovery Time Objectives(RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives that many IT teams either can’t or don’t have the time to manage themselves.
That makes it easier to align IT operations with higher-level business priorities such as bringing infrastructure physically closer to customers for lower latency connections and choosing specific cloud service providers’ availability zones and regions to serve as backup resources that help sustain the customer experience even during an interruption.
Outside Help is Here
Cloud services have revolutionized the way today’s businesses operate. They leverage powerful computing environments and nearly limitless storage capacity to tackle everything from artificial intelligence for autonomous vehicles and financial services to storing vital patient health information.
However, they’ve added more complexity to an organization’s infrastructure and increased the risk of costly downtime from a host of possible causes beyond the scope and scale of what most IT teams can handle. No matter the industry or service, businesses need a strategic, agile, and comprehensive plan for reacting to business threats ranging from network crashes and power outages to ransomware attacks and natural disasters that can cripple a business to the point of closing its doors for good.
Disaster Recovery as a Service is quickly gaining an audience among business and enterprise IT leaders. It is an efficient, cost-effective, and reliable way of protecting their operations from imminent and unforeseen existential threats.