Why do I need a Cloud DRaaS solution?
With so many businesses reliant upon internal and external access to and transfer of data, a disaster situation such as a major building fire can cause crippling damage to providers and end-users alike. A simple restoration of your most recent data snapshot will not be sufficient to resume business operations; a complete replication of your compute resource will be required.
What is Firstserv Disaster Recovery as a Service?
Firstserv DRaaS is a fully managed, DR service which utilises a cloud-based resource model. Your ICT estate is replicated and hosted in a dedicated DR environment within a virtual Firstserv resource pool. We use the latest enterprise grade equipment located in one of our geographically diverse and secure UK data centres. Our expert team of in-house cloud engineers work directly with you to assess and plan bespoke Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives (RTO and RPO), ensuring timely, responsive and compliant hosting is available when you need it most.
Features and Benefits
- Accelerate and manage the successful recovery of your business
- Peace of mind knowing the service is fully managed with 24/7 support
- Off-site deployment so your data is protected in geographically diverse locations
- Ability to scale your resource in line with the demands of your business
- Recover to your pre-defined Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), allowing key data to be saved more frequently
- Recover in line with your Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), allowing your business to react accordingly
Protected Workload
Using enterprise-grade software, the workload that needs to be protected can be defined along with the requirements for backup frequency and data retention. When handling large datasets, the same tools can be used to transfer data to a seeding disk drive; this encrypted data can then be sent by courier and imported into our cloud platforms to significantly reduce the time taken to protect your business.
DR Plan & Test
Tools are installed in your primary compute environment, whether on-premise, in colocation racks or hosted in a cloud. These are then configured to backup servers in our privately owned, geographically diverse UK data centres. The correct and appropriate technology is then chosen and deployed to ensure your agreed RTO, RPO, and commercial demands are all met. Data is routinely backed up to a secondary location with a defined and reserved amount of CPU, memory and disk space. Regular DR invocation testing can be undertaken in alignment with your agreed and approved Business Continuity plans.
Disaster Recovery
When an event takes place that requires the invocation of your DR plan, resources within our data centre alongside our highly skilled engineers can be used to bring your business online at full or partial capacity. Our engineers can be available to assist in the turning up of services and any agreed work to ensure end-user availability. We believe that a successful DR invocation is measured by user experience and not just infrastructure availability.
- Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) determines how quickly you expect full compute resources to be restored.
- An RTO of 4 hours is standard practice, though 1 hour recovery, or “live/live’ real-time restore, can be achieved if required
- The agreed RTO is aligned with the Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) to provide a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for full Disaster Recovery.
- A 24 hour RPO and a 4 hour RTO would drive a 4 hour restoration of compute services and a restoration of data no more than 24 hours old.
- Some companies may choose to pay a higher fee for more frequent synchronisation which allows a shorter RPO window, e.g. a recovery point objective of 4 hours.
- RPO determines how far back you wish to go when you restore data from a backup.
- The RPO cannot be a timeframe more frequent than the actual backup schedule. For example, if the managed backup is scheduled for every 24 hours, the best-case RPO will be 24 hours.
