Cloud computing is hardly a new player of the IT world. Its ever-growing market share and popularity within the IT community derives from combining flexible prices with the Always-On Availability of infrastructure resources. It brings out a whole new world of possibilities for your business, while reducing the long-term costs of maintaining your own infrastructure. Yet, despite the obvious cost advantages of moving data to the cloud, pricing is still a top concern, as Veeam discovered from our recent 2016 cloud end-user survey (see chart below).
Are cloud backup and DRaaS affordable?
The answer depends on many factors. A change of mindset is required when thinking about the affordability of cloud-based backup and disaster recovery (DR). Depending on your individual business requirements, cloud backups or even a full Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution can be very affordable, especially considering the money saved in the event of a disaster. The general rule is the lower the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) your business requires, the higher the potential cost.
The infrastructure savings
There is a significant amount of money saved through not having to build and maintain a completely new DR site from scratch, and you can set up ready-to-go cloud infrastructure to the highest standards of security and Availability. Its resource flexibility allows for quick adjustments to sudden or planned spikes of your environment. That way, you don’t need to worry about buying additional hardware for establishing a DR site with its own hosts and storage to cover those demanding peak or production down times, just to watch it sit idle 99% of the time, consuming power.
What is the cost of no cloud backup or DRaaS?
Loss of revenue
Should one forgo the idea of using cloud services and utilizing the potential of the DRaaS, the obvious fate is in the sum of tens of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in lost revenue that can occur during downtime. The impact and cost of application outages and degradation have increased tremendously with the growth of digital business, with Gartner estimates at $5,600 per minute of downtime.1 During downtime, no transactions can be made through an ecommerce site, and once the opportunity for a prospect is lost through an inability to purchase, it is likely they will not return. If you wisely choose to have a recovery plan in place, it is essential that the timing on RTOs and RPOs reflect the amount of money you can afford to lose. Gartner has seen a significant increase in the number of Gartner client inquiries over the past year in which the client’s organization needs to support recovery times of four hours or less for mission-critical applications as well as IT service availability levels of at least 99.5% (i.e., approximately 3.6 hours of unplanned downtime per month).2
Loss of productivity
Downtime can cause employees to either do jobs ineffectively or not at all. Communication with clients, colleagues and managers can come to a dramatic halt and leave an entire organization twiddling their thumbs, wondering what to do next. Every hour of lost productivity includes wages which must be paid despite the fact there is downtime. So, it’s easy to see how the costs can add up. Even the loss of one VM with a critical application can cause trouble in the workflow, so it’s important to think through every unpleasant scenario to cover with a backup plan — even the smallest one.
Loss of reputation
A blow to the reputation and loss of customer trust make up the ultimate price that every company should dread. In certain instances, this can eventually lead to going out of business. Whatever happens on your main production site, you should be able to get back up in a matter of minutes and continue working until the initial issue is dealt with.
Imagine your whole production site going down. This would definitely interrupt every business process if you do not react accordingly. Or, another option is to rely only on a local backup that — you guessed it — also went down with the main site. With all of your servers patiently waiting in the cloud infrastructure, this won’t be a problem for you, since you’re just a click away from performing a failover to whichever servers you require at the time for an uninterrupted operation.
A good example of a large-scale, unexpected disaster is the Delta Airlines data center outage that occurred Aug. 8, 2016. It resulted in hundreds of flights being grounded for six hours, affecting thousands of people around the globe. Such delays and cancellations of departures produced frustration and caused long lines at airports. Explore more real-life stories of challenges faced by companies from all around the world and from all different industries, and how Veeam helps them to remain in control on our Success Stories page.
Why cloud?
All of these scenarios were present before the cloud emerged and companies were reliant on their own DR solutions, if they had any. As the industry evolved and grew an additional layer of Availability with cloud computing, new ways of managing your data and accessing it appeared. With Veeam Cloud Connect and DRaaS, it’s easier than ever to have ready-to-go infrastructure straight away with a full control of your backups and replica VMs, always giving you the edge to conquer any adversity that lies along the way to success. Check out our cloud solutions webpage to discover your option.
1 Gartner, How to Evolve Beyond a Blame-Network-First Culture, 24 June 2016
2 Gartner, Managing IT Resilience Is Much More Than Simply Failing Over Applications, Refreshed: 28 September 2016 | Published: 31 March 2014
Read also
- How Veeam enables Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) as part of a comprehensive availability strategy
- Cloud backup security concerns
- Migrating to the cloud
- Cloud backup customization