Solution: DRaaS
Field: Software
This Advizex customer is a unique software developer, with a range of solutions around employee training and regulatory compliance.
Its clients use the company’s software platforms to ensure efficiency and to intelligently manage risk and regulatory compliance. With that, the company’s own risk mitigation and regulatory compliance are crucial.
After all, the company’s own risk is a component of its many customers’ compliance postures. “A lot of their high-end customers were asking what kind of disaster recovery solutions they had in place,” says Joe Clarke, Director of Cloud Architecture at Advizex. “This became the impetus for them to look more closely at their business continuity and compliance plan and the technology they’d need.”
An outside-the-box DR solution
Despite providing its solutions to some of the biggest enterprises, healthcare organizations and financial services companies, the Advizex customer operates relatively lean. It runs its hyper-converged solution on infrastructure in a colocation facility in a nearby state.
Any disaster recovery (DR) solution would need to meet its risk and compliance requirements, but at the same time do so on a limited budget. Typically, such a solution would be anything but, requiring duplicate hardware, expensive replication tools and a lot of time-consuming professional services.
The company turned to Advizex for some outside-the-box thinking and a strategy that could cost-effectively achieve its disaster recovery goals. The first thing the team at Advizex did was to look closely at the company’s specific environment and disaster recovery needs to understand what would work for the company and its budget.
The team at Advizex developed a scalable low-cost solution for backup and DR-as-a-Service using a “storage dense, compute light” approach. It was ideal for meeting the required 24-hour RTO cost-effectively and reliably.
“We put a solution in place where everything is backed up on AWS for a small monthly fee, but with minimal compute resources. They only really pay for compute resources when they enter disaster recovery mode, if a situation occurs,” says Scott Feffer, Senior Account Executive at Advizex.
“On top of that, we automated a lot of scripts to perform disaster recovery functions, so [they don’t] have to worry about managing the whole process when they have to implement DR.”
Rather than having to pay the cost of a like-for-like backup and recovery, doubling the cost of their infrastructure, the company can get the same resiliency for about one-sixth of the cost, or less.
After a brief implementation by the Advizex professional services team over only a few weeks, the project then was handed off to the Advizex managed services group, which runs the backup and disaster recovery day-to-day.
A DR solution that’s been put to the test
One of the most important realities of a disaster recovery plan is the recognition that no matter how resilient data centers are, they can and do fail, and the key is to understand and plan for that failure.
Some months after the customer implemented its new backup and disaster recovery solution, the worst happened: a fire at the colocation caused an outage that promised to bring every client down for days. But thanks to its cloud-based DR solution and Advizex-managed services, the company was back up and running well within its 24-hour RTO window.
The complete recovery, which only cost a couple of thousand dollars, has already saved the company untold amounts in terms of reputation, customer retention and client satisfaction.
It’s a testament to the seamlessness and professionality of the handoff between Advizex teams that the recovery took place without any involvement from the original implementation team. “It took zero minutes of professional services time during the recovery,” Clarke says. “That says a lot about our managed services.”
In addition to cost-effectively meeting the compliance obligations of its customers, the solution has an additional benefit. It’s being used to help provide data immutability, locking down its backup so it can’t be modified or deleted based on timestamp adjustments. To protect against time-based attacks, Advizex created a platform that runs strictly off the world clock.
In addition, because it’s cloud-based, the solution is more future-proof. The need for upgrades will come at a slower pace, allowing Advizex and its customer to think more programmatically about how to tackle them.
In the meantime, should a disaster occur, like the fire in their colocation facility, the company doesn’t need to scramble. It’s armed with a reliable solution that meets its RTO (recovery time objective) and customer compliance needs, protecting the business, its customers and, ultimately, its reputation.