Disaster recovery is vitally important to ensuring business continuity in the face of infrastructure failure. Leveraging it as a service can reduce costs by up to 80%. Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) is a vital and strategic framework for businesses, as it allows companies to align IT activities to business objectives, and ensures that they both follow the rules and manage risks effectively.
From a GRC perspective, governance is predominantly internally focused, as it relates to company processes and visibility within the business. Risk and compliance, on the other hand, are issues that your partners can assist you with.
Among the key risks facing a business are the challenges that come with operating one’s own ICT facilities. This includes the complexity and added cost involved in ensuring a secondary site that will allow for effective business continuity.
Effective disaster recovery (DR) is a key element of a GRC strategy, and its goal is to ensure your business can quickly recover from losing access to its primary physical infrastructure.
Routed’s Disaster Recovery Service (DRaaS)
The nature of DR is such that it is seen as a costly expense for something that is essentially standing idle the majority of the time. Deploying DR as a Service (DRaaS) is one way to help minimise the expenses traditionally associated with DR. Routed’s own DRaaS offering is specifically designed to ensure the availability of its clients’ services, at a much lower price point.
There are two distinct topologies we offer in this regard:
Ground-to-Cloud
In this scenario, a customer has their own on-premise private cloud – the ‘ground’ – and requires a secondary DR site. We are able to deliver this via our Routed Virtual Private Cloud, leveraging either our Johannesburg or Cape Town availability zones.
What is crucial here is our ability to share assets, as this means that the client is not paying for the service on a one-to-one basis, thereby reducing the cost significantly. In effect, we charge customers approximately 20% of the cost for the vCPU and vRAM required for the recovery site. The full fee is only charged should they have to fail over to the recovery site.
Cloud-to-Cloud
This is for customers who already reside on Routed Virtual Private Cloud and enables them to leverage our second data centre as their DR site. We have a national circuit between the Cape Town and Johannesburg availability zones, and they are isolated and operate completely independently from each other.
We are thus able to allow customers to take their workloads and replicate these to our alternate availability zone and use this as their recovery site. From a cost and functionality perspective, the value proposition remains the same as Ground-to-Cloud.
Technical Adoption of Routed DR as a Service
Routed uses two replication and recovery technologies integrated into our cloud -VMware Cloud Director Availability and Veeam Cloud Connect Replication. The most commonly adopted solution would be VMware Cloud Director Availability.
This VMware Cloud Director Availability appliance is deployed in the customer’s on-premise facility and is used to identify the inventory within their vCenter environment and pair into their organisation within their Virtual Private Cloud. Additionally, Cloud Director Availability supports additional advanced capabilities such as test failovers, recovery reports, and automated failover policies.
The products we use to replicate and recover for a DR scenario cater for the following key capabilities:
- Self-service replication and recovery
- Low Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs)
- Automated recovery plans
- Failover and compliance reporting
- Test failover in a bubble network
- Failback replication and recovery
Looking at things from a risk perspective, DR is an essential component in protecting your organisation’s ability to do business, while enabling you to remain compliant. It may seem like an almost needless expense, but it forms the foundation of true business resilience.
Ultimately, this is what Routed is offering its clients: business resilience in the face of a potential disaster. Thanks to our DRaaS service, we are positioned to ensure all our clients—both those with on-premise operations and those already in Routed’s Cloud -are capable of meeting any potential disaster scenario head-on, while maintaining full alignment with GRC requirements.
