Why you can’t leave Disaster Recovery out of your IT budget in 2017

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With January over, 2017 is now in full swing. At this point, businesses are likely to consider whether their New Year’s plans that have been in motion for one month are delivering results and if not, working towards a solution.

An aspect of any business that is viewed closely continually is, of course, budget. A crucial yet overlooked element for businesses is typically one of the first to be reviewed in terms of costs – this being down to the vast amount of scalability that IT offers. It is easy for decision makers to cut out elements of IT that they believe are no longer a “necessity”. Businesses are often sticking to as basic of an IT set-up as possible, which is no longer efficient.

As a result, additional IT options are not even considered. An example of this being Disaster Recovery.

When disaster strikes, businesses need to be able to recover IT systems as quickly as possible. Without a Disaster Recovery plan in place, businesses are at risk of financial costs, reputation loss and even greater risk for its clients, customers and employees. Despite this, each year business continuity gets cut from the budget and companies continue to fail to invest in DR.

These are three common objections that continue to dominate the Disaster Recovery budget discussion and this is why IT leaders need to dispute them:

1. COST

Business leaders wrongly assume that Disaster Recovery is going to take up a lot of your budget. Many of those who do consider DR, tend to primarily think of investing in a secondary data centre – which would require second copies of all servers, storage and networks. Not to mention the cost of maintenance.

Implementing a Disaster Recovery plan doesn’t mean businesses have to invest in a secondary data centre. Cloud-based DR, otherwise known as Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) enables failover of virtual machines to secure cloud locations. DRaaS provides flexibility to only pay for what you need. Having an on-demand pricing model means the costs are therefore remarkably low. With DRaaS, organisations do not have to sacrifice the ability to failover in a time of need and are also gaining the benefits of security and compliance within the cloud platform. It has now become a lot more cost-effective for organisations to invest in DRaaS rather than building and managing a secondary data centre.

In addition to this, there is no requirement to carry out a recruitment process to find the additional staff to maintain a DR plan as CSPs offer on-hand technical support within their monthly costs.

2. NO OUTAGE EXPERIENCE

This objection is unrealistic and could result in major consequences – and it is more the case that enterprises do face outages but fail to report them to senior leadership.

Although these outages are considered insignificant and go unreported, over the course of a week, a month or a year, these “small” outages could potentially impact revenue negatively and as a result, restrict budget even further.

In addition to this, downtime can impact reputation, customer loyalty and employee productivity.

Organisations need to be more active in their approach; utilise the data on outages, attacks, maintenance windows and upgrade problems that exist in your current IT set-up to truly implement a reliable and effective DR strategy.

3. “WE’RE OK WITH DOWNTIME”

The final objection that is often used is that small doses of downtime are not worth taking action – in other words, they are accepted. Businesses may question how much downtime would actually affect the business and argue that as all their systems are not customer facing, it isn’t a huge deal.

Gartner has reported that 72% of firms had to use their IT Disaster Recovery plans, in its 2015 Business Continuity Management Survey, and estimates in their 2016 Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service that the DRaaS market will nearly triple in the next three years to a revenue point of $3.4 billion by 2019.

These objections are costing businesses both time and money, whether they are aware of this or not. Disaster Recovery should no longer be viewed as an option but, instead, be viewed as a necessity.

Atlas Cloud offers DRaaS powered by industry-leading Zerto. It is a cost-effective managed service from the UK’s leading virtualisation specialist. In the case of an outage or disaster, Atlas will make your data and desktop environment available quickly and efficiently, providing a holistic recovery solution.

As a managed service, this enables you to focus on the operational aspects of the disaster whilst we recover your IT systems.

If you’re interested in implementing a DRaaS solution within the cloud, contact us to find out more.

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