According to an Infrascale study, 21% of SMBs do not have a data backup or disaster recovery solution in place. Businesses need to protect their data and applications to avoid costly business interruptions as well as extend on-premises backup storage and archiving solutions to the cloud.
Small and medium businesses often keep upgrading on-prem server storage to keep up with their backup needs. However, they suffer regular backup failures due to on-premise hardware limitations. It is untenable for businesses today to be without the ability to resume business within 24 hours if a disaster occurs.
The customer challenges are two-pronged.
One is the cost factor. Aging backup hardware and software that require frequent maintenance drives additional support and IT costs. Also, on premise backup infrastructure needs exceeding budget year-on-year. The risks too are greater since the IT teams are unaware when backups fail due to storage or software issues, and it is difficult to acquire and provision storage quickly enough to mitigate risk.
Then there are the cybersecurity threats. With nearly half of cyber-attacks targeting SMBs, business leaders are concerned about ransomware attacks that could cause their business to lose access to apps and data for hours, days, weeks or forever. They are also concerned about the ability to recover data and applications due to a disaster, cyberattack or employee error within 24 hours.
Azure Site Recovery
Microsoft Azure offers an end-to-end Business Continuity and Data Recovery solution that’s simple, secure, scalable, and cost-effective—and can be integrated with on-premises data protection solutions. In the case of service disruption or accidental deletion or corruption of data, it allows organizations to recover business services in a timely manner.
Simple to deploy and manager: Set up Azure Site Recovery simply by replicating an Azure VM to a different Azure region directly from the Azure portal. As a fully integrated offering, Site Recovery is automatically updated with new Azure features as they’re released. Ensure compliance by testing your disaster recovery plan without impacting production workloads or end users.
Reduce infrastructure costs: Reduce the cost of deploying, monitoring, patching, and maintaining on-premises disaster recovery infrastructure by eliminating the need for building or maintaining a costly secondary datacenter. Plus, pay only for the compute resources needed to support apps in Azure.
Minimize downtime with reliable recovery: Easily comply with industry regulations such as ISO 27001 by enabling Site Recovery between separate Azure regions. Scale coverage to as many business-critical applications as needed.
The built-in disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) allows SMBs to inexpensively implement disaster recovery to the cloud. According to a 2019 IDC whitepaper, organizations are able to restore data and applications with an average 66% shorter recovery time by using cloud for their data protection strategy compared with on-premises alternatives.
Photo by Markus Spiske
