A Short Guide to Ideal Disaster Recovery

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!