The  DR  Problem  

Many  businesses  rely  on  Disaster  Recovery  (DR)  services  to  prevent  either  man-­‐made  or  natural  disasters  from  causing  expensive  service  disruptions.  Unfortunately,  current  DR  services  come  either  at  very  high  cost  or  with  weak  guarantees  about  the  amount  of  data  lost  and  time  required  to  restart  operation  after  a  failure.  

Regardless  of  the  size  or  type  of  business  that  you  run,  you  need  to  have  a  disaster  recovery  process  in  place  in  order  to  ensure  that  your  customers,  be  they  internal  or  external,  can  continue  to  access  your  services  and  systems.    Like  any  insurance  policy  though  it’s  difficult  to  justify  its  expense  until  it’s  needed.  

 

What  is  DR-­‐as-­‐a-­‐Service?  

Cloud  computing  and  virtualization  opening  up  a  plethora  of  opportunities,  business  enterprises  are  discovering  that  a  lot  of  applications  can  be  availed  as  services,  DR  being  no  exception.  

Delivering  Disaster  Recovery  as  a  Service  (DRaaS)  or  DR  as  a  cloud  service  or  DR  on  demand.  DRaaS  as  a  model  is  gaining  popularity  among  enterprises  mainly  due  to  its  pay-­‐as-­‐you-­‐go  pricing  model    

Disaster  Recovery  As  A  Service    

that  can  lower  costs,  and  use  of  automated  virtual  platforms  that  can  minimize  the  recovery  time  after  a  failure.  

Virtualized  cloud  platforms  are  well  suited  to  providing  DR.  Under  normal  operating  conditions,  a  cloud-­‐based  DR  service  may  only  need  a  small  share  of  resources  to  synchronize  state  from  the  primary  site  to  the  cloud.  The  full  amount  of  resources  required  running  the  application  only  needs  to  be  provisioned  (and  paid  for)  if  a  disaster  actually  happens.    The  cloud  can  facilitate  disaster  recovery  by  significantly  lowering  costs:  

• The  cloud’s  pay-­‐as-­‐you  go  pricing  model  significantly  lowers  costs  due  to  the  different  level  of  resources  required  before  and  during  a  disaster.  

• Cloud  resources  can  quickly  be  added  with  fine  granularity  and  have  costs  that  scale  smoothly  without  requiring  large  upfront  investments.  

• The  cloud  platform  manages  and  maintains  the  DR  servers  and  storage  devices,  lowering  IT  costs  and  reducing  the  impact  of  failures  at  the  disaster  site.  

 

 

 

The  Nephos  Cloud  DR  Service  

As  an  independent  Cloud  Services  Broker,  Nephos  Technologies  is  perfectly  placed  to  offer  its  customers  DR-­‐as-­‐a-­‐Service,  with  low  monthly  payments,  a  guaranteed  service  level  agreement,  and  24x7  monitoring.    Not  only  this  but  as  an  independent  provider  we  are  in  a  unique  position  to  be  able  to  guarantee  your  data  sovereignty.    

Nephos  Technologies  DR-­‐as-­‐a-­‐Service  offering  provides  enterprises  of  all  sizes  with  a  global  disaster  recovery  solution,  but  requires  no  expensive  hardware  deployment.    

Now  companies  can  have  all  the  benefits  of  comprehensive  offsite  disaster  recovery  protection  without  cost-­‐prohibitive  facility,  equipment,  IT  management,  and  software  expenses.  Pay  for  email  disaster  recovery  back-­‐up  resources  only  as  needed.  Free  up  scarce  customer  IT  resources  for  your  business-­‐critical  projects.  

 

Our  solution  can  be  delivered  in  three  ways:  

1)  Back  Up  to  and  Restore  from  the  Cloud  

Applications  and  data  remain  on-­‐premises  in  this  approach,  with  data  being  backed  up  into  the  cloud  and  restored  onto  on-­‐premises  hardware  when  a  disaster  occurs.  In  other  words,  the  backup  in  the  cloud  becomes  a  substitute  for  tape-­‐based  off-­‐site  backups.  

2)  Back  Up  to  and  Restore  to  the  Cloud  

In  this  approach,  data  is  not  restored  back  to  on-­‐premises  infrastructure;  instead  it  is  restored  to  virtual  machines  in  the  cloud.  This  requires  both  cloud  storage  and  cloud  compute  resources.  The  restore  can  be  done  when  a  disaster  is  declared  or  on  a  continuous  basis  (pre-­‐staged).  Pre-­‐staging  DR  VMs  and  keeping  them  relatively  up-­‐to-­‐date  through  scheduled  restores  is  crucial  in  cases  where  aggressive  RTOs  need  to  be  met.  

3)  Replication  to  Virtual  Machines  in  the  Cloud  

For  applications  that  require  aggressive  recovery  time  (RTO)  and  recovery  point  objectives  (RPOs),  as  well  as  application  awareness,  replication  is  the  data  movement  option  of  choice.    

 

Replication  to  cloud  virtual  machines  can  be  used  to  protect  both  cloud  and  on-­‐premises  production  instances.  In  other  words,  replication  is  suitable  for  both  cloud-­‐VM-­‐to-­‐cloud-­‐VM  and  on-­‐premises-­‐to-­‐cloud-­‐VM  data  protection.  

By  leveraging  our  brokerage  platform  and  our  ability  to  blend  Cloud  based  services,  Nephos  Technologies  are  able  to  offer  our  clients  a  disaster  recovery  environment  that  exploits  the  cost  benefit  and  flexibility  of  using  public  Cloud  services  and  ensures  data  sovereignty  for  your  business.    In  most  cases  any  single  Cloud  service  has  limited  presence  in  any  one  region  –  we  are  able  to  use  multiple  providers  within  a  single  region  to  make  sure  that  you  always  know  where  your  data  is  held  but  without  the  cost  of  having  a  dedicated  infrastructure  running  at  all  times.    The  Nephos  Benefit  As  an  independent  provider  of  Cloud  service  aggregation  we  are  able  to  ensure  that  we  have  the  flexibility  to  deliver  services  that  meet  your  needs  rather  than  opting  for  expensive  bespoke  built  co-­‐location  services.    We  give  our  customers  the  following  benefits:    

• A  replica  of  all  protected  systems  frequently  updated  by  incremental  backups  or  snapshots  at  intervals  set  by  the  user  for  each  system.  The  user  determines  the  settings  according  to  recovery  point  objectives  (RPO).  

• Full  site,  system,  disk,  and  file  recovery.  • Fast  SLA-­‐based  data  recovery.    In  most  cases  service  can  

be  restored  in  under  45  minutes  • No  need  to  make  expensive  capital  purchases  • Pay  as  you  grow  service  with  transparent  cost  model  • Vendor  independent  service  • 100%  data  sovereignty  guarantee    • DR  rehearsal  that  demonstrates  the  viability  of  the  DR  

plan.  

 

Nephos  Technologies  Suite  18250,  Lower  Ground  Floor,  145-­‐157  St  John  Street,  London,  EC1V  4PW  

www.nephostechnologies.com