When Unpredictable Natural Disasters Hit, How Do You Recover?
How do you plan for the unplannable? As a managed service provider (MSP), your job is to protect customer data no matter what, and that includes when natural disasters strike. In order to meet the needs of customer environments, budgets, and best practices, flexibility is key. Discover how Axcient’s latest innovation, Direct-to-Cloud hardware-free BDR, ensures business continuity regardless of nature’s challenges.
The cost of disaster from fire to failure.
Natural disasters threaten lives, land, and livelihood at an alarming rate, and their increasing frequency and risk cannot be taken lightly. Thinking, “it won’t happen to me,” and foregoing a detailed disaster recovery plan could be a fatal mistake for your customers and your MSP. In 2020, California fires burned more acres in a single year than ever before, and Colorado suffered the three largest fires in state history. Hurricanes significantly damaged the Florida Panhandle, tropical storms caused widespread flooding in the south, and tornadoes raged from Texas, through Oklahoma, and many southern states.
According to statistics, 40 to 60% of small businesses never reopen after a disaster, and 90% fail within the following year if they’re unable to restore operations within five days. Despite these chances, just 20% of businesses, or one in five, don’t have a disaster recovery plan in place. With the cost of downtime starting at $10k per hour for small business, it’s shocking that only 2% of businesses can recover in less than one hour.
Sure, natural disasters only cause 5% of business downtime because most of us don’t live in, or have data centers in these high risk areas. However, the most common cause of downtime, accounting for 45%, is due to hardware failure and aging device components. Much like natural disasters, when hardware dies of natural causes, everything stops.
Back up your backup.
Both onsite and offsite backups have their benefits, but natural disasters threaten an appliance-only environment. Because physical devices are subject to damage from unexpected natural disasters and failures, it’s necessary to back up your backup.
Axcient x360Recover with Direct-to-Cloud gives MSPs and their customers the flexibility necessary to backup from any environment. x360Recover enables on-prem, turn-key appliances for local backup, while Direct-to-Clout delivers an additional layer of security with hardware-free BDR. Additionally, public cloud backup is available to protect servers in Azure, AWS, or Google with long-term retention. And starting in early 2021, Direct-to-Cloud Private Cloud allows MSPs to use their own private cloud to recover – perfect for larger MSPs who want to run their own infrastructure, or are required by compliance standards.
Now, if physical on-prem servers go down, catch fire, are inaccessible, or underwater, you can still immediately recover from any recovery point with a 15-minute recovery point objective (RPO) through virtualization, virtual export, volume mount, or bare-metal recovery. No matter the disaster, you can recover everything from data and applications, to production servers and workstations in an instant.
Self-manage your recovery.
Because time is critical during disaster recovery, Axcient implemented Virtual Office at the end of 2020. With Virtual Office, MSPs can self-manage disaster recovery and virtualization to recover anything from file and folder backups, to the entire IT infrastructure. Virtual Office is immediate and provides a minutes-long recovery time objective (RTO) for environments of all sizes.
Unfortunately, many offsite virtualization tools require engagement with the solution provider to initiate virtualization. During a natural disaster, this could add hours, or even days or weeks to customer downtime. For customers living in high risk areas, MSPs can use Virtual Office test-mode to demonstrate quick recovery, and prove the solution effective before it’s necessary. Seeing recovery in action before there’s a disaster not only helps customers meet compliance requirements, but it provides them with peace of mind.
Test your current solution.
Axcient invested years of research and development, and patented 30 new technologies to deliver Direct-to-Cloud to MSPs and their customers. Direct-to-Cloud capabilities, combined with appliance-based options, eliminate the costly and stressful consequences of vendor sprawl by meeting all customer BCDR needs with just one platform. Chain-free backup eliminates time-consuming reseeding, unlimited storage and retention makes surprise overages and fees a thing of the past, and simplifying under one backup provider means there’s only one process for onboarding, training, support, billing, and restores.
So how does your current BCDR solution compare?
Start Your Free 14-day x360Recover Trial now to see how simple backup can be, or Schedule a Demo with an Axcient Product Expert for a personalized look. How quickly can you get customers running after disaster strikes? With Axcient x360Recover, you can guarantee near immediate recovery no matter what.
About the Author:
Liz Mellem // Technical Copywriter, Axcient
Liz Mellem has been a freelance copywriter for over three years in the technology, education, and alternative medicine industries. She produces content, sales collateral, and email marketing campaigns that contribute to digital marketing strategies for sales growth and brand awareness. In her free time, Liz enjoys reading, exploring Austin, and Netflix with her cat, Harlem.