Business Continuity Matters Most: 7 Crucial Questions to Ask Your Disaster Recovery as a Service Provider

An ITIC study found that downtime costs exceed $300,000 per hour for small, medium, and large enterprises. The same report noted that 44 percent of responding mid-sized and large enterprises said that a single hour of downtime can cost upward of $1 million. If your business hasn’t paid this price yet, it likely will at some point. The Uptime Institute’s Annual Outages Analysis 2023 found that 78 percent of respondents had an outage (i.e., downtime) in the past three years.

With the odds stacked against you, preventing downtime is a paramount concern for IT pros. That explains why Markets and Markets projects the disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) market will grow from $10.7 billion in 2023 to $26.5 billion by 2028. 

These growing investments in DRaaS make sense when balancing risks against costs because they help your organization recover its IT systems and data quickly. Calculating what downtime and data loss would cost your organization easily makes the financial case for DRaaS. 

The best DRaaS cloud solutions provide data backup and protect on-premises business systems and data. They also ensure recovery even if you experience a sitewide disaster that destroys your on-premises and offsite backups. Many choices are available today, so what should you look for in a DRaaS solution? Here are a few questions you can ask cloud solution providers to help you make the right choice for your business. 

1. Does your solution support my recovery point and recovery time (RPO/RTO) objectives?

Your RPOs and RTOs are vital metrics that define how much data your business can afford to lose and how much downtime it can handle before the damage becomes too great. Arcserve Cloud Services, our cloud-based DRaaS solution, delivers total business continuity and ensures you can get critical business systems back online quickly and easily.

With Cloud Services, you can meet your unique recovery requirements while enjoying access to data anywhere, anytime, with instant failover to a secure, fault-tolerant business continuity cloud. It also offers the resilience and elastic scalability to adapt to continuously changing business continuity requirements in real time.

2. Can I customize the solution to fit my needs and budget?

Arcserve Cloud Services offers three service levels that provide preconfigured retention settings or allow you to customize your setup to meet your RPOs and RTOs. While default settings are three daily and two weekly retention points, 20 more retention points are available at no additional cost. So, you can customize your backup strategy by adding more daily, weekly, or monthly recovery points. Choose the service level based on your needs and enjoy low costs, control over cloud settings, and predictable monthly pricing.

With Cloud Basic, you get secure offsite storage of critical business backups with a complete system restore via a bare metal restore (BMR) drive. With Cloud Plus, you get everything in Cloud Basic, adding immediate file and folder recovery from the cloud. And with Cloud Premium, you also add fast virtualization of your systems and data in the cloud. 

3. Is protection from data loss, hackers, ransomware, and other threats included? 

Arcserve Cloud Services is built over an enterprise-grade, secure, and redundant cloud infrastructure. The solution is housed in one of the world’s most secure and energy-efficient facilities, with layered security, built-in redundancy and fault tolerance, and controls that strictly limit access to your data.  

When paired with Arcserve’s backup and recovery solutions, Cloud Services ensures complete and reliable business continuity, even if you’re hit by ransomware or other attack vectors. You can replicate backup images from Arcserve OneXafe appliances, ShadowXafe, or ShadowProtect software to Cloud Services to keep your business running no matter what because your data is always fully recoverable. 

4. Do I have to pay additional fees to recover my data? 

Many DRaaS providers charge for data recovery. Not Arcserve. Cloud Services includes 30 days (720 hours) of free virtualization per machine per year. That means you can frequently test your business continuity plan to ensure you are always prepared and recover when needed without worrying about a hit to your budget.

5. Is it easy to manage data protection and disaster recovery?

The Arcserve self-service cloud portal lets you centrally manage your cloud backup and recovery solution anytime, anywhere. The portal dashboard shows the status of all accounts, machines, seed drives, BMR drives, virtual machines (VMs), and account space used. 

Cloud Services lets you set individual account alerts to notify you when uploads become inactive or data growth exceeds established thresholds. You can also set alerts to notify you when new machines are added or deleted, VMs are running, and seed and BMR drives request updates. And if disaster strikes, you can fail over without third-party intervention. 

6. Does the solution offer one-click failover and orchestrated recovery?

Use Virtual Machine Policy, available with Cloud Premium, to configure your mission-critical systems' recovery sequence, order, and timing. Cloud Services also offers the unique—and patented—ability to test or start site-wide failover processes by pressing a single button.

7. Do you offer advanced networking support?

With Cloud Services, you can customize your recovery network firewalls and update your recovery networks through Open VPN or IPsec to enable site-to-site, single-user, or virtual private network (VPN) connections. 

Advanced networking features include:

• Port forwarding

• Port blocking

• Network control options such as DHCP

• Independent and isolated recovery networks

• Static public and private IP address reservations

• Dynamic private IP address available at the time of a disaster

• Flexible and custom VPN configurations

Arcserve Technology Partners: The DRaaS Experts

Arcserve’s partners are data protection experts who can help you put the optimal DRaaS solution in place for your business. 

Choose an Arcserve Technology Partner.