Modernization has been clearly taking its toll on climate by increasing the average temperature of the earth’s surface and creating more mega disasters than ever before. In the US, we were struck with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which was the single most costly natural catastrophe since 1980 and insured losses amounting to $60,500,000. The wildfires that raged across Northern California in 2015 resulted in economic losses of almost $2 billion. And the recent drought in California resulted in a loss of $1.84 billion. We have seen an unsettling trend in the form of numerous hurricanes and droughts all over the US. The number of yearly geophysical, meteorological, and hydrological catastrophes have increased to almost twice of what it was in the period between 1980 and 1985.
What it means for your organization
When hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast in 2012, many centralized data centers took a hit and major businesses had to shut down. Companies which had in-house servers and backup repositories, lost a huge amount of data and revenue. Since then, business leaders have taken the impact of climate changes on their IT operations more and more seriously. Most of the IT executives today understand the essence of a disaster recovery plan, either onshore or offshore. Average spending on data recovery tools is increasing over the years as businesses are becoming more conscious to the perils of downtime loss. In fact, IDC estimates that the data protection and recovery software market is valued at about $6 billion with a 6.4% CAGR in 2015.
Many companies initiated efforts to maintain backup data centers for their business. But, the cost of maintaining two data centers is something not every company can afford. That’s why there are companies like NIC, a Los Angeles based managed service provider that are providing Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to make things easier for companies in case a disaster strikes. So basically, you don’t have to manage IT infrastructure and worry about hardware contracts and upgrades.
Should you opt for Disaster Recovery?
According to a study carried out by the Aberdeen Group in 2013, the average cost of downtime amounted to $8,000 per hour for a small company to $700,000 for a large enterprises. Furthermore, it takes an organization an average of 18.5 hours to recover from a disaster. This adds an additional hidden cost of the damage to your brand and reputation.
Disaster recovery programs have come a long way since their inception. Companies quickly realized that maintaining two data centers at a time is impractical, and considering that the frequency of a serious outage is not very high, the investment of maintaining a double pool of hardware cannot be justified. This gave rise to companies offering DRaaS.
In a report, Gartner states that DRaaS is not necessarily less expensive than in-house DR systems, but they can be very cost-effective if the only alternative you have is to build a new recovery site with new equipment. In the 2015 Magic Quadrant report, Gartner states that the early adopters of DRaaS were mostly small businesses, but the DRaaS market has greatly matured since then and diversified in its functionalities while dropping the monthly service costs making it accessible to all sizes of businesses.
In another report by the Aberdeen group, it is mentioned that companies that have used DRaaS show significant cost savings and that it was the leading benefit of using cloud as a disaster recovery tool. Companies are generally charged on the basis of the number of virtual machines used to replicate the size of data and depends on factors like RPO (Recovery Point Objective), RTO (Recovery Time objective), storage, etc.
To outline what I discussed above, the changing climate of California with the increasing occurrences of calamities like earthquakes, drought, and forest fires is a huge concern for your business. You should take the required steps to protect your company from any such catastrophe. The initial obvious step – to maintain an offsite backup of all your data and applications does work sometimes but has implications on the downtime due to the complexities involved in resuming business from a remote location. Firms administering DRaaS provide customized solutions to companies looking for disaster recovery plans at very cost-effective prices and help them overcome such difficulties. Such companies employing DRaaS usually save a substantial amount in their Disaster recovery tools, whereas minimizing their downtime when a crisis strikes.
To clearly assess the disaster recovery spending, organizations need to estimate the downtime costs of crucial business systems, calculate the potential risks and danger (both natural and artificial) and compare alternatives to employing suitable DR schemes. At NIC we understand the importance of your crucial business data. We store your data on our SSAE 16 data servers, which are capable of enduring any natural disaster. Additionally, we have servers located remotely in the Arizona desert so as to protect your data from any type of catastrophe.
As an experienced company providing multiple managed IT services, NIC uses cloud-based servers to host your data that eliminate the need for costly hardware maintenance at your end. Further, we provide 24/7 technical support to help you with your data recovery needs. Contact us today to select from the various disaster recovery plans and minimize the risk of future data loss for your company.
