Disaster Recovery for Everyone!
Disaster Recovery (DR) for IT Services forms part of your Business Continuity Plan (BCP). It is a key agenda item but often is not a priority or in some cases can even be avoided due to the cost and manual effort and resource required.
If IT services fail organisations face losing substantial sums of money as well as impacting their credibility.
With DR being a huge discussion topic area lets look at the key points that will be discussed in this article.
Throughout this article we will be exploring how to protect your IT services in the event your in-house system becomes unresponsive and in what situation you would need to invoke DR for example: if the applications or services are offline for an unacceptable amount of time as stated in your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
What is RTO and RPO?
A good definition can be found on the slide below by David Vellante on Wikibon.org:
What do your IT department currently have for DR?
Enterprises really are the main users of DR, with some SME’s and SMB’s also taking part in the action.
Many DR strategies are put in place due to regulation requirements or customer contracts requiring it.
The current stance is to replicate your current IT Services into another site. This can be to another provider or to another site in a different country. Most companies will look for a minimum of geographically redundancy — this is where the other site is at least 30 miles away from the current site.
However when replicating your infrastructure it becomes expensive — essentially you double your infrastructure costs. This often puts companies off implementing a DR strategy around their critical IT services.
Not only do you need a second set of infrastructure but you must also keep your database in sync. If your database is not up to date, you will lose data should you have to fail over.
The other steps that come into play are:
- Flipping your network traffic to point at the secondary site
- Manual labour required to plan and execute the failover to the DR site.
Ensuring your plan can be tested is often another pain but there are other options — so let’s explore these.
Is DR for everyone?
Yes it is achievable! The good news is cloud computing and in particular Microsoft Azure are making it accessible to everyone at a fraction of the cost it used to be.
With the ability to spin up and spin down Azure resources on demand (remember this brings cost savings!) and with services such as Azure Site Recovery (ASR), DR now is a possibility for every business.
Azure Site Recovery
Remember my publication on “The SPI Model Explained”? In the case of ASR think of it as Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).
You can use ASR if you are already using any of the below platforms:
- VMware
- Hyper-V
- Physical servers
- Microsoft Azure
What makes up ASR?
The basics are shown below:
- Blob Storage — You need to be able to replicate your data to the secondary site and Blob Storage is where your replicated data is held. Don’t worry, Blob Storage is cheap compared to SAN storage (2TB of Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) — £38.16 per month at time of writing).
- Azure Site Recovery Service — essentially you are paying Microsoft for a service to orchestrate, provision (infrastructure), migrate (data) and provide automated recovery services across your chosen IT platforms — it even includes support for Linux! This starts at £18.64 per month per instance when redeploying to Azure. An example of an instance is a single virtual machine.
*Note* When trying to replicate different platforms such as VMware there will be other components required to ensure ASR can function. For the technical details check out this link.
If you take both of these costs into play, it is an estimated £264 per month (9 ASR instances and 2TB of LRS) for the key functionality and tooling of your Disaster Recovery plan.
Can you even get a one hosted physical server for that?
What is in scope for DR?
No matter the size of your business, DR for your IT services should always form part of your strategy. DR doesn’t have to be complicated, you just need to have a documented strategy and plan for everyone to follow.
Think of a simple DR strategy for your desk phone — 99% of businesses will ask employee’s to use their mobile phones to carry on with business as usual.
The easiest way to look at what is in scope of DR is to Tier your applications. This can be based on criticality. Think of it like this….what applications do you need as a minimum to keep the business running?
For a good guide to application tiers check out Erik Svenson from Microsoft post.
This should all be part of your BCP but it’s important to note that not all applications need to be in scope of DR.
When planning for DR it’s key to understand what systems and services are crucial for your business to continue and then ensure these are in scope of Azure Site Recovery.
We have a DR strategy so my business is safe…
This is a great start and definitely worth the investment but with only 40% of DR platforms being tested once a year there is still a cause for concern.
DR should not just be set up as a tick box exercise. DR platforms should be tested at a minimum of once a year. Testing allows you to see what works and where the gaps are. It also allows employees to understand their roles should DR be invoked.
Senior leadership should be the driving force for DR planning and a designated team should be assigned for managing the DR process.
DR takes time and costs money but the question remains — What do you stand to lose should the systems be unavailable for an unacceptable period of time?
Review with a view
DR is never an easy subject for any business as essentially your planning for something that could never happen or what could be an even scarier position is if you are starting your plan from scratch.
Never the less DR is an important part of any business. As we move through the Digital era, with more and more of our daily interactions relying heavily on various online applications then DR has to a consideration for any company.
Azure is bringing Enterprise grade IT to all. Services like Azure Site Recovery are giving all businesses the option to protect themselves.
ASR is removing not only the cost that was associated with traditional DR methods but manual labour. This gives your business the ability to survive and most importantly giving your customers what they pay for.
ASR gets a massive thumbs up from me and I highly encourage any business to consider implementing it going forward — note you can even use ASR as a way to migrate to Azure for good!
MyMateTech’s Conclusion
DR is no longer just for the enterprise world. Services like ASR are assisting all businesses at a fraction of the cost.
A topic that is often overlooked or not reviewed at all can now become reality for all.
ASR is not just a point and click solution and will require time and effort from your teams to implement but think of the benefits!
DR doesn’t require a natural disaster to occur or the famous saying “what if a plane hits the Data Centre?”. It could be that your internal infrastructure decided to have its last day.
Having a service like ASR means you don’t have to wait 8 weeks for a physical server to be delivered or a day for an engineer to be sent to your site.
There are many examples of organisations already using ASR. If you are interested in how you can take advantage then contact your Cloud Service Provider (CSP) and get the ball rolling!
