Planning for Failure: Why to Consider Azure for Disaster Recovery as a Service

"Disaster recovery is one of those afterthoughts, typically, in organizations," says Tim Harris, vice president of strategy and solutions with Arbela Technologies. "I think it's because of the perceived complexity."

As Harris detailed in a recent webinar for the Dynamic Communities user groups, recent research suggests that just slightly more than half of organizations have a documented disaster recovery plan in place. Moreover, a similar percentage doesn't perform any of type of testing or preparation of their business continuity/disaster recovery plans. Of those that do test, only a quarter can confidently state their tests met the target recovery objectives defined by the business.

These findings are troubling, given the huge potential costs of even a few minutes of unplanned data center outages.

The benefits of the cloud versus a secondary data center

Azure, Microsoft's cloud platform, offers disaster recovery as a service, or DRaaS, called Azure Site Recovery. Essentially, it provides automated replication of a data center to the cloud, Harris said, and has some distinct advantages over other disaster recovery approaches.

Cloud-based disaster recovery is a less expensive and simpler alternative to operating a secondary data center, Harris said. In fact, disaster recovery as a service can be one-third the cost of an on-premise disaster recovery approach. The reason? Rather than replicating a full data center, with all the hardware, maintenance fees and other cost that entails, DRaaS replicates just the storage of information and scales to full production just at fail-over. "You're not paying for full production service until you actually need it," Harris said. Azure DRaaS supports the recovery of VMWare, ...