A New Concept in Recovery – Disaster Avoidance-as-a-Service

A Service Azure and AWS can’t Touch

Our collective Unitrends hearts and prayers go out to victims of Dorian in the Bahamas. Because of the nature of our business, we are keenly aware of the damage that a hurricane can cause.

The threat of hurricanes is rising dramatically. Dorian became the 5th Atlantic Category 5 hurricane in just the last 4 Years. Hurricanes pose a particular threat to IT as they can completely wipe out an enterprises’ computing infrastructure. For hurricane protection, enterprises are increasingly turning to cloud-based Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). In fact, in our 2019 Cloud Survey we found that DRaaS was the second most popular cloud-based service after storage/archiving.

Proactive Fail-overs

Last week, as Dorian approached, multiple Unitrends customers requested a proactive failover of their DRaaS coverage. Unitrends brought up their applications and waited to see if hurricane would bring their data centers down. We are happy to report that no one failed. What did the exercise in preparedness cost each of them – Nothing! One of the customers, Safety Products of Lakeland Florida did a proactive failover last year for Hurricane Irma. Read the details of their disaster avoidance efforts here.

What is Different about Unitrends DRaaS

Unitrends DRaaS is very different from others. Public clouds such as AWS and Azure simply offer you the compute and storage infrastructure to manage your own DRaaS. You need to become an expert, do the work, and manage the recovery when disaster strikes. With Unitrends DRaaS, we take on the responsibility of setting it up, ensuring it functions properly, doing regular testing to guarantee recovery, and when disaster strikes, managing the fail-over. All Unitrends users must do to recover from a disaster is call our Support Center and we do the rest. In fact, we are so sure of our approach to DRaaS that we offer written guarantees of our recovery performance. We are the only DRaaS provider that offers 1 hour and 4-hour Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

To learn more about DRaaS and its adoption read Proof DRaaS Delivers – Unitrends 2019 Survey Findings

Disaster Avoidance-as-a-Service

The way Unitrends DRaaS is priced it includes support for an unlimited number of fail-overs and 30 days of cloud operation after each failover at no extra charge.  Customers threatened by an imminent disaster are encouraged to do a proactive recovery. They can declare a tentative disaster and Unitrends will bring their infrastructure up in the cloud but stop short of deploying the SSL VPN that redirects their users to the cloud. If the hurricane does bring down the data center, Unitrends can quickly issue the VPN and the remote users failover in just minutes, with almost no downtime and little data lost.

Why Azure and AWS can’t offer this

With public cloud DRaaS offerings they charge the second you begin to use computing cycles or move data around. You pay for the cloud services whether you are actively using them, or they are sitting idle, waiting for an actual disaster to happen. Unlike Unitrends whose white glove managed service is delivered by cloud and DR experts Azure and AWS simple cannot offer DRaaS.

Unitrends DRaaS is simple to budget. A yearly charge is all that you pay with never any upcharges for the number of recovery events or their length. With public clouds you must guess how many and how severe the downtime event will be. Guess wrong and you blow your budget.

If you work in a disaster-prone area of the world – yes, I am talking to you in California – you can take advantage of Unitrends DRaaS with a single low yearly cost. We are so sure our DRaaS is less expensive than AWS or Azure we put a cloud cost calculator on our website for you to see for yourself.

When being proactive cost you nothing it is easy to be prepared.

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