If you’re like over one third of businesses, you might not be fully aware of the impact of unplanned downtime. Here are some quick figures – nearly half of businesses experience over four hours of unplanned downtime every four months, and according to Aberdeen, just one hour of downtime can cost an average of $260,000 USD. In other words, a thriving business can expect to lose at least one million dollars a year, if not more, due to IT failures.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Disaster recovery systems should be able to bring your mission-critical productivity and customer experience applications back online instantly – not after four hours of lost money. So, when downtime inevitably occurs, how are companies ensuring that their customers and workers don’t notice a difference?
Harnessing the Cloud for Instant Fail-over
Fail-over works like this: when one of your services fails, another copy or version of that service re-instantiates to take its place. In computer networks, fail-over is often used to counteract internet outages – if your T1 line goes down, the network may automatically switch you over to broadband or cable/DSL so you’ll at least have some connectivity. For applications, the principle is mostly the same.
Let’s say that your business hosts CRM software. All of a sudden, a hard drive overheats in one of the servers hosting the application. Ideally, a different server – possibly even a different data center – would immediately spin up a new instance of the same application and re-initiate user sessions on that instance. Done quickly enough, users and customers would detect nothing more than a brief flicker in their connectivity or application performance.
The problem here is getting to that point. How can you improve your fail-over speed – reducing the time it takes for applications to switch in case of downtime? Is it really as simple as switching to the cloud?
For Best Fail-over Results, Try a Local Datacenter
Response time is going to be one of the biggest bottlenecks in terms of getting the fast fail-over rate you desire. Services like AWS and Azure offer comprehensive fail-over tools – but their data centers might be thousands of miles away from you and your customer locations.
BIOSME offers a comprehensive disaster recovery service specifically for customers in the Middle East. Our full-featured disaster recovery service is based in the UAE for low latency and is run from an in-country NOC. When you work with our fast, secure architecture, your recovery times will drop from hours to minutes – saving you a huge amount of money every year. Want to learn more? Contact us today!
