DRaaS – in the end what matters is the Recovery SLA

In a previous post, we outlined key criteria to look for in Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offerings to give you the confidence that you are truly covered in the event of a disaster.

Including:
1. Ability to perform a full site disaster recovery, including addressing key concepts of network mappings and cross-application dependencies
2. Support spin up for heterogeneous environments
3. Recovery Assurance and compliance based reporting

Those are truly the base line, must-have features for any DRaaS offering, and you should ensure that any vendors being considered as a Cloud Service DRaaS provider can supply these features as a first round of elimination.

After you have eliminated most vendors for not meeting these criteria, you should then ask the following question:

What is your published, guaranteed Service Level Agreement (SLA) for a site recovery?

This means – how long will it actually take to get my servers back up and running ?

You will most likely receive ambiguous answers like: it “should” take minutes to a couple of hours for a recovery. Or, the ever-so-specific “Trust us, we can bring your site up.”

You may be surprised at the responses you get.

One customer of Unitrends was considering a DRaaS offering from another vendor during their evaluation process and the other DRaaS vendor had a 15 minute spin up time. After probing to see exactly what that meant, it was revealed that the SLA was 15 minutes “per server” not for the entire site. Most applications today have dependencies (Web server -> SharePoint -> SQL -> Active Directory, Exchange -> Active Directory). Having an SLA per server, not for the entire site, rendered that service useless as it would take hours to bring his site back up which had over 50 critical servers.

If vendors are serious about protecting your data and bringing your site (irrespective of the number of servers to spin up, not just a single server) back up, they should state an SLA and abide by it:

Unitrends DRaaS service guarantees a 1 hour spin up of your site in our cloud. A 1 Hour Full Site Recovery SLA.

With an exceptional onboarding process and white glove service, Unitrends DRaaS delivers the peace of mind that you seek, that if and when disaster strikes, your business will be up and running within the hour. That is our promise, our pledge to you.

You can learn more about Unitrends Disaster Recovery as a Service and other Unitrends Cloud offering here.

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