Disaster Recovery has changed

Simple and affordable Disaster Recovery? Sounds oxymoronic, right?

I have thronged the small medium businesses (SMBs) space in the past few months. I have seen many SMBs resort to the cheapest form they can get their hands on. It could be a Synology here or a QNAP there, and that’s their backup plan. That’s their DR plan. When disaster strikes, they just shrug their shoulders and accept their fate. It could be a human error, accidental data deletion, virus infection, data corruption and recently, RANSOMware! But these SMBs do not have the IT resources to deal with the challenges these “disasters” bring.

Recently I attended a Business Continuity Institute forum organized by the Malaysian Chapter. Several vendors and practitioners spoke about the organization’s preparedness and readiness for DR. And I would like to stress the words “preparedness” and “readiness”. In the infrastructure world, we often put redundancy into the DR planning, and this means additional cost. SMBs cannot afford this redundancy. Furthermore, larger organizations have BC and DR coordinators who are dedicated for the purpose of BC and DR. SMBs probably has a person who double up an the IT administrator.

However, for IT folks, virtualization and cloud technologies are beginning to germinate a new generation of DR solutions. DR solutions which are able to address the simplicity of replication and backup, and at the same time affordable. Many are beginning to offer DR-as-a-Service and indeed, DR-as-a-Service has become a Gartner Magic Quadrant category. Here’s a look at the 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for DR-as-a-Service.

And during these few months, I have encountered 3 vendors in this space. They are sitting in the Visionaries quadrant. One came to town and started smashing laptops to jazz up their show (I am not going to name that vendor). Another kept sending me weird emails, sounding kind of sleazy like “Got time for a quick call?”

I started gravitating towards Infrascale because I was impressed with what they have to offer. First of all, as mentioned in the Gartner DR-as-a-Service 2016 report, a 15-minute RTO service level is pretty darn impressive. This is probably a US-only SLA, and granted that their presence in Asia is still limited, the ability to recover in 30 minutes is like a life saver for SMBs.

At the same time, they have strong certification and accreditation such as FISMA, HIPAA, FINRA and PCI DSS, which put Infrascale in good standing with SMBs with concerns about security, data compliance and governance. In addition, they have a comprehensive support base of many OSes, including Apple MacOS, IBM i-Series, Linux, HP-UX, beside the usual bases of bare-metal, VMware vSphere, Hyper-V and devices running iOS and Android. For SMBs, you will never know what platforms to expect, and this well-covered support is important.

I have reached out the BCI Malaysia chapter to address this gap in terms of DR for SMBs. DR simple and affordable? Definitely!