Implementing Emergency Restoration for IT Infrastructure

Downtime in IT services can lead to significant problems for small and medium-sized businesses. That’s why it’s crucial to implement the capability for emergency recovery of IT infrastructure, to restore the functionality of business applications as quickly as possible. Implementing this task on the client’s premises would require considerable material and human resources. However, there is an alternative option: the Disaster Recovery service, which can be provided by a cloud provider. Let’s explore what this service entails, who it benefits, and what opportunities it opens up for businesses.

Disaster Recovery: What Is It?

Disaster Recovery (DR) is a set of specialized software tools that can restore the functionality of IT infrastructure in a short time. Following recovery, data becomes accessible again, and client services and systems continue to operate normally.

Why is Disaster Recovery so important? Veeam, a leader in the development of backup solutions, has released its latest Data Protection Trends Report for 2024. Here are some key findings from the report:
- 53% of surveyed companies are looking for an alternative to their current backup product or service;
- for the second consecutive year, the most important factors in choosing an enterprise backup service are reliability and protection of IaaS and SaaS workloads;
- modern data protection solutions need to be flexible and hybrid;
- cyberattacks remain the most common and most impactful causes of IT infrastructure failures for the fourth consecutive year;
- 76% of the companies surveyed have faced ransomware at least once in the last 12 months;
- transferring data from local IT infrastructure to a fail-safe platform is a necessity for businesses aiming to protect against cyberattacks and disasters.

The need for emergency recovery of IT infrastructure often arises after serious breakdowns of computing equipment, seizures by regulatory authorities, sabotage, theft, data loss, and technological disasters. Many organizations that store backup copies in the same location as the current data version will also suffer in such situations: a fire can destroy all equipment just as surely as criminals can steal it, and law enforcement can seize it. Moreover, having a backup copy does not ensure quick data recovery: it is a labor-intensive process that requires specific resources and tools.

According to Veeam, only 13% of organizations meticulously approach the organization of work processes and integrate them into their disaster recovery plan. Meanwhile, the number of companies using the DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) from a third-party cloud service provider for emergency recovery is increasing year by year. This trend is expected to continue in the near future.

How to Implement Disaster Recovery in Practice

There are several ways to ensure the recovery of IT infrastructure after a disaster:

Building a Backup Site Independently
This involves deploying on-premise, which is considered the most labor-intensive and expensive option. Companies will need an additional site besides their main one, which they must build and maintain over time.

Disaster Recovery on Leased Dedicated Servers
In this case, the company rents dedicated servers in a data center of a trusted provider. This site can be located in the same city as the client’s IT infrastructure, in another country, or even on another continent. This solution will be more fail-safe and provide higher reliability for backup storage: they will survive a fire or sabotage in the local data center. However, this solution also has downsides: high implementation costs and the complexity of keeping data up-to-date.

Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
Cloud environments allow for flexible management and easy scaling of cloud resources. These advantages also apply when a company uses the cloud for Disaster Recovery. This approach allows for the use of and payment for only the truly necessary resources. For example, use only storage and obtain virtual capabilities for deploying services only in case of a disaster, or rent both storage and a resource pool for running IT services. If in the first case the provider does not guarantee instant allocation of virtual resources, in the second, they will definitely be available when needed.

What is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

DRaaS is a service model for disaster recovery that allows businesses to quickly restore the functionality of all or part of their IT infrastructure using a provider’s backup facility. Recovery is conducted according to a pre-approved Disaster Recovery Plan.

Reasons why medium and large businesses choose DRaaS:

• Fast recovery speeds: Enables rapid restoration of IT functions.
• Cost-effectiveness: Offers an optimal price for the services rendered.
• Real-time hot data replication: Ensures immediate duplication of crucial data.
• Access to top-tier recovery software solutions: Utilizes advanced technology from leading vendors.
• Flexible licensing terms: Allows adaptable arrangements for software use.
• Data consistency post-recovery: Maintains data integrity after retrieval from backups.
• Scalable recovery resources: Provides almost unlimited capacity for infrastructure expansion as needed.

Understanding If Disaster Recovery Suits Your Business

For businesses, it’s crucial not just to restore IT infrastructure but to assess the performance of recovery outcomes. Recovery speed and overall cost are directly influenced by Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Let’s delve into these parameters:

RTO (Recovery Time Objective)
RTO defines the duration during which IT infrastructure will be unavailable following an incident. The optimal RTO varies by business and depends on how long a business can afford to be offline without severe consequences. The lower the RTO, the more critical continuous service is to the business, but the cost of achieving a low RTO is higher.

RPO (Recovery Point Objective)
RPO is the maximum acceptable period during which data might be lost without significant business impact. For example, if RPO is set at 30 minutes, backups are performed every 30 minutes. Therefore, the IT infrastructure, once restored, will revert to the state it was in at the last backup. A lower RPO means more frequent backups and, consequently, higher Disaster Recovery costs.

To determine the best RTO and RPO for your business, you need to balance critical downtime duration and the cost you are willing to pay for Disaster Recovery services. This compromise involves understanding the real criticality of downtime for your operations and how much you are prepared to invest in minimizing potential disruptions.

Expert from Colobridge: Setting RTO/RPO for Your Company

Determining the appropriate Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for a specific company can be straightforward. First, identify the freshness of data your business can operate with without significant issues. Second, understand how much data loss your business can tolerate without noticing — whether it’s an hour, a day, or perhaps a week.

According to my data, Colobridge clients prefer to schedule data backups every 24 hours, typically during the evening or nighttime when IT services are least busy. This approach ensures that data is retained for a week, creating seven recovery points. Such a strategy results in a repository that is 1.3 to 1.4 times larger than the current data copy. This allows for effective and manageable data recovery while accommodating typical business operations and minimizing the impact of data loss.

When and Who Needs Disaster Recovery?

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is an ideal choice for the corporate sector. Medium to large companies, aiming to protect against severe IT infrastructure failures, are indeed prepared to invest in business resilience. Leading this group are companies where data availability and IT services stability directly impact the quality of services, revenues, and reputation. For instance, banks and fintech companies frequently opt for Colobridge’s DRaaS due to their sensitivity to downtime; they prefer solutions with minimal RTO and RPO as these are cost-effective compared to the losses associated with downtime. For service sector companies, the size of the business often dictates the approach — sometimes it’s cheaper to insure against disaster consequences to avoid financial and reputational losses, but only when these exceed the costs of using DR services.

Colobridge Expert Insight:
Even within the same industry, the need for and demand for Disaster Recovery services can vary greatly. Consider a company that provides nationwide express delivery services. One might suffer significantly if its digital services are down for more than an hour — facing large losses, warehouse overflow, and disrupted supply chains. Another company might find a few hours of downtime less critical, thus requiring different data and service recovery speed standards.

Are backups and Disaster Recovery the Same?

At first glance, Backup as a Service (BaaS) might seem similar to DRaaS. However, BaaS primarily involves storing backup copies in the cloud on the service provider’s side. DRaaS, on the other hand, entails a complete mirroring of the entire IT infrastructure in the cloud. In the event of a disaster, DRaaS enables automatic activation of virtual servers in the cloud within a short period. Recovery can begin quickly from a chosen point because data is stored in a production storage environment, not archived. Plus, clients can set their backup schedules, choosing the frequency of backup creation and other parameters for restoring virtual machines that suit their business needs.

Still, DRaaS does not eliminate the need for conventional backups. Ideally, they should be used in conjunction with disaster recovery services: for example, storing “cold” systems in traditional archived backup copies, and copying “hot” data every few hours. The former can be stored for a week, while the latter for two to three days.

Disaster Recovery as a Service on the Colobridge Platform

We offer a disaster recovery service for IT infrastructure into our cloud repository, based on two German data centres Tier III/Tier III+. Our clients, with or without the aid of our technical specialists, select the optimal number of recovery points and the frequency of backup creation tailored to their business specifics. They have access to any volume of virtual resources and the ability to quickly scale them as data volumes grow.

Learn more about Colobridge’s DRaaS and get expert help in developing an emergency recovery plan for your infrastructure from our specialists.