Smart Disaster Recovery
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) is a vital practice of most risk-sensitive organizations who understand the importance of minimizing outages to the user community. Being able to recover essential services quickly after a significant disaster event is critical. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is defined as providing a remotely hosted disaster recovery service to protect a business’s data and applications. Organizations implement DRaaS solutions to improve their Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO), preferably in a cost-optimized fashion. Enquizit has led the successful implementation of smart cloud-based and cost-effective Disaster Recovery solutions with near real-time RPO and RTO by winning competitive solicitations.
Tackling the Disaster Recovery Challenge
Many organizations still maintain complicated and expensive on-premise Disaster Recovery (DR) data centers as their primary means of addressing DR. However, they often struggle with this approach and face many common challenges:
- DR site not adequately sized to handle significant events – i.e., 1-1 match PROD to DR not existing – too costly
- DR site performance inadequate on peak load does not scale fast
- PROD site has evolved while DR has not based on cost factors
- DR configuration management hard to keep up and complex
- Security oversight for PROD vs. DR typically not equal
- Difficulties predicting BCDR test results and post-test remediation
Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), such as AWS and Azure, offers a wide range of solutions to address the challenges organizations face using on-premise data centers. A cloud-based DR approach is ideal for organizations that are not yet ready to migrate their production workloads to the cloud. DR offers a great cloud-first use case as it allows organizations to get their “feet wet” in the cloud while gaining experience working with CSPs. More importantly, CSPs offer a very compelling Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared to on-premise DR solutions when implemented correctly.
A well-architected cloud-based implementation for low RTO/RTO must include innovative ways to continuously replicate data from production data centers to the cloud for host images, files, and databases. For example, AWS with the 2019 acquisition of CloudEndure.
Enquizit’s experience implementing large scale cloud-based DR solutions for organizations, including the staging and migrations of legacy systems, has equipped our team to take an integrated and innovative approach to Disaster Recovery as a Service. Enquizit’s proprietary SKYMAP ™ cloud orchestration framework enables clients to design and build highly automated and resilient DR solutions that are scalable, agile, and cost-optimized to achieve the lowest RPO/RTO possible.
Enquizit’s DRaaS Approach
Enquizit is a qualified systems integrator with extensive DRaaS experience. We leverage the knowledge and experience acquired over the years migrating thousands of production workloads to the cloud on behalf of our clients. Enquizit’s approach and guidelines for solving the DR challenge include:
- Ability to preserve the production system environment attributes for cloud-based DR such as namespace, host interfaces, and logical network addressing to minimize impact to application operation.
- Ability to successfully integrate Warm Standby / Pilot Light services, comprised of client’s technology standards such as F5’s LTM and Palo Alto’s Next-Generation Firewall, and CloudEndure DR utilizing automation and orchestration capabilities.
- Achieve near-zero data loss and low RTO for hundreds of servers with the ability to scale to thousands of servers. The approach is based on using CloudEndure DR and other proven asynchronous data replication solutions across the various replication patterns – many of our competitors rely on replicating backups to the DR site only to hydrate the data that results in a protracted RTO.
- The degree of DR automation developed for our clients results in a much more streamlined solution than traditional on-premise DR approaches. When a disaster happens, the total time it takes to surface systems and services with confidence in DR mode (RTO) is everything. Also, removing errors introduced by humans and systems is associated with a manually intensive process and an environment subjected to continual configuration drift.
Minimize significant changes and impact on production environments while implementing DRaaS. - Create a fully replicated environment for annual DR testing, which is entirely isolated. The isolated annual DR environment is removed after the annual DR test completes to optimize costs.
The Enquizit differentiator is our ability to deliver a comprehensive DRaaS solution that accounts for multiple replication patterns (database, file, host-based) that minimizes the customer’s steady-state runtime cost and all the while maintaining near real-time RPO and RTO targets.
Download our DRaaS White Paper
Message us here to receive more information about our Disaster Recovery cloud-based solutions and approach. This white paper also includes a guide for selecting the right cloud DR service for your organization.