December 10
When an issue occurred with AWS in Northern Virginia’s US-East-1 region on December 6th, many large companies like Amazon’s own Whole Foods, felt pain. Unfortunately with complex systems downtime can happen. Even a few minutes of downtime can be quite costly. Exact figures are difficult to calculate, but a comprehensive Gartner study pegged the average cost of downtime at $5,600 per minute, while a 2016 Ponemon Institute report put the figure closer to $9,000 per minute. Even for small businesses with a minimal IT footprint, the loss of productivity and missed opportunities can still cost between $137 and $427 per minute.
But organizations don’t have to live in fear of downtime. By implementing the right redundancies, they can protect their business operations from the sort of widespread outage that afflicted AWS on December 6. Investing in a robust disaster recovery solution that ensures mission critical data and applications can still be accessed in the event of downtime.
Top 3 Disaster Recovery Options
The growth of the cloud computing and colocation data center markets have given rise to several options when it comes to backing up essential infrastructure for business continuity. Here are three of the most popular solutions available today:
1. Multi-Cloud DR
While it may sound counterintuitive to turn to a multi-cloud environment to protect essential operations from cloud-based outage, it can be a highly effective and cost-efficient solution provided there’s enough diversity among an organization’s cloud vendors and regions. Cloud resources can be provisioned as cold storage to store periodic snapshots of backup data that can be deployed following a downtime event, but they’re also available for running idle or active services for much faster recovery time. At the higher end of the cost spectrum, warm standby DR services can spin up smaller, but essential workloads within minutes that keep mission critical data and applications available during an outage.
2. Multi-Infrastructure or Hybrid DR
Hybrid IT infrastructure incorporates a mixture of private and public cloud environments and is frequently deployed in colocation data centers that combine extensive redundancies with direct on-ramps to cloud providers. Since assets can be backed up on either end of the hybrid environment, this approach to disaster recovery offers some level of protection against the relatively modest SLAs offered by many of the leading cloud providers. Data and applications can even be backed up in separate, dedicated hardware on-site within the data center for an extra level of redundancy. Since the odds of both the data center and the cloud provider suffering at outage are quite low, this multi-infrastructure approach to DR is highly effective.
3. Multi-Region Cloud DR
Some organizations cannot tolerate even a millisecond of downtime. For these companies, a multi-region cloud strategy can provide a resilient infrastructure to keep essential services up and running with zero downtime and near zero data loss. Similar to a 2N infrastructure redundancy in the data center space, multi-region DR solutions maintain identical production workloads in a primary and a secondary cloud region. All data traffic coming through the network passes through both regions, with the primary region functioning as the main production workload and the secondary region serving as a real-time backup. Should the primary region go down for any reason, the secondary region immediately takes over. This active/active approach to DR is costly to maintain, but it ensures that business operations will not be impacted by an outage.
Enhance Your Recovery Strategy With Evoque Data Center Solutions
Implementing a disaster recovery solution is much easier when you have access to a combination of cloud computing and colocation services. Whether you’re backing up physical servers or diversifying your business continuity plan with disaster recovery as-a-service (DRaaS) cloud providers, having the right partner who can connect you to the best solutions for your organization’s needs can help you avoid costly downtime events. With multiple data center locations in the US and around the world, Evoque Data Center Solutions provides robust infrastructure for on-site disaster recovery assets. Our cloud hosting and consulting services can also help you eliminate your costly-to-manage equipment and transition to a purely cloud-based environment with extensive back-up options that ensure continuous uptime. To learn more about how we can help you protect your business against downtime, talk to one of our technology experts today.
