How do you Budget for DRaaS?

DRaaS is corporate IT insurance. It protects against the most severe forms of disaster such as the total wipe out of a data center due to floods, fire, electrical failures, hurricane or any number of employee-caused events, accidental or malicious.

DRaaS (Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service) enables business applications to be run on remote computing infrastructure in the event the primary servers, storage, and / or networks are incapacitated. You just can’t buy DRaaS once there is an issue, you have to plan, setup, test, and maintain DRaaS capability including replication of your latest backups so data is protected and your business users are running post failover with the latest content.

For those who have never considered DRaaS it can seem quite expensive. The cost of cloud or remote storage, excess server capacity, strong network performance and the time and effort to set it up does not come cheaply. But how expensive is it and how can you justify the expense to your management?

You have to consider DRaaS as business insurance – you hope you never have to use it, but if you do you are glad you had it as it can save a ton of money and maybe even your job. So if you do decide to move forward how do you decide on how much to budget?

If you have a sense of your organizations’ cost of downtime, that is a good place to start. The Ponemon Institute estimates that the average across all industries and enterprise size is $9,000 per minute. This is not just lost sales and revenue but also loss of employee productivity, and business processes such as having your web page go dark. As they say, your mileage will vary but try and get a sense from senior management on that number.

Next – build out a chart like the one below with your downtime estimate. This one uses the Ponemon estimate of $9,000 per minute.

Availability

Downtime (Year) Downtime (Month) Monthly Downtime Cost

99%

3.7 Days 7.2 Hours

$3.9M

99.9%

8.8 Hours 44 Minutes

$396K

99.99% 52 Minutes 4 Minutes

36K

You are probably already running at 99% or 99.9% uptime as you are still experiencing some periods of downtime. You will be surprised to see that downtime has such a large negative impact but it is expensive and is a reoccurring charge for every event. Downtime events are not smoothly spread across a year. You could go months without an event, and then a bad software patch can bring a critical server to its knees for days at a time. The negative financial hit can be concentrated in a few events, but for analysis purposes we have smoothed this over the course of year.

I would start by proposing to spend one “month” of downtime savings. This should be easy to justify the cost of DRaaS to senior management. This is an easier sell if the company has just had a recent event and the memory of the impact is still fresh. Your estimate will probably be whittled down but that is just part of the normal budgeting process.

Once approved this dollar figure represents just your outside spending, so you will need to understand how much extra IT time and cloud knowledge is available to create and manage the DRaaS solution. This figure could be much larger than the external costs, depending on what technology you choose to implement.

The thing to also keep in mind is that Unitrends requires little of your time or effort. We offer White Glove services to do the work for you. For public clouds such as AWS or Azure, you and your people have to become experts and spend a good percentage of your time doing what Unitrends does for you.

Once you have number in mind you can see what sort of DRaaS services you can afford. We have built our Cloud Cost Calculator to compare the financial costs of public cloud-based and Unitrends approach to DRaaS. You will be asked to estimate the number of downtime events you will have next year as that has a large impact on the cost of public cloud DRaaS. With Unitrends the cost that is listed is “all in” with no additional charges based on events.

We think you will see the financial advantages of Unitrends DRaaS. A few other points to consider:

  • You can run your operations in the Unitrends cloud for up to 30 days after each event at no additional charge. This gives you time to get your datacenter backup and operating without killing yourself.
  • We have data seeding that allows your data to be loaded on hard drives and overnighted to get your data into or back out of the cloud. This could save weeks of time and the impact on your WAN.
  • Unitrends also guarantees the speed of our recovery in writing because we are so sure we will do it right the first time. Nothing like that from public cloud providers since you have to do all the work.

We are sure that once you see the details you will understand why Unitrends DRaaS is the best offer. We are the shortest and easiest route to a professional DRaaS program in the industry.

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