Provision of cloud based ‘Disaster Recovery As A Service’ (DRaaS) for Trent & Dove

Summary

The A4S Cloud Team delivered a ‘Disaster Recovery As A Service’ (DRaaS) using the Microsoft Azure Site Recovery with real time monitoring alerting is provided using the A4S Lighthouse Service.

A managed service is also implemented to continuously monitor performance and health, support is provided for any incidents or upgrades when required.

A rehearsal was undertaken to provide assurance to the client’s internal audit function.

Challenges

Trent & Dove has a short deadline to replace their existing DRaaS delivered using the capable Zerto platform which has been in service for several years.

Levels of disaster recovery protection would be required to ensure relevance and alignment to business need.

Disaster Recovery is an essential part of any IT infrastructure, but it comes with its own set of challenges. Here are some common challenges:

Complexity: Disaster recovery planning can be complex and requires significant planning and resources to implement. Organisations may struggle to understand and prioritise which systems and applications are most critical to recover in the event of a disaster.
Cost: Disaster recovery planning can be expensive, especially for smaller organisations with limited resources. Investing in backup infrastructure, redundant systems, and data replication technologies can be a significant cost for businesses.
Recovery Time: The time it takes to recover from a disaster can be lengthy, depending on the scope and severity of the event. Organisations may experience significant downtime during the recovery process, which can impact business operations and result in lost revenue.
Testing: Disaster recovery plans must be tested regularly to ensure that they are effective and can be executed successfully in the event of a disaster. However, testing can be time-consuming and require significant resources to perform.
Human Error: Human error is a common cause of data loss and can occur during the disaster recovery process. Organisations must ensure that their disaster recovery plan includes proper training and procedures to minimise the risk of human error.
Security: Security is a critical aspect of disaster recovery, and organisations must ensure that their disaster recovery plan includes adequate measures to protect their data and systems from cyber threats and other security risks.

Overall, disaster recovery is a complex and resource-intensive process that requires significant planning, resources, and ongoing maintenance to be effective. Organisations must carefully consider the challenges they may face and develop a comprehensive disaster recovery plan that addresses their unique business needs and risks.

Service features

The A4S DRaaS offering ensures the client can focus on delivering services to its own customers safe in the knowledge their disaster recovery capability is continuously monitored and maintained.

The A4S DRaaS offering is based on Microsoft Azure Site Recovery (ASR) which is fully integrated with the Azure cloud service, very capable and cost effective.

Here are some of our key service features:

Monitoring and Reporting: We include monitoring and reporting tools, which allow organisations to track service performance and ensure that backups are running as expected.
Security: We build in robust security measures, such as encryption and multi-factor authentication, to ensure the service is protected from unauthorised access.
Cloud Storage: Data is securely stored in the cloud, which means that data can be accessed from anywhere and is not tied to a particular physical location, where needed we can enable geo-replication for further levels of resilience.
Ongoing Support: We continuously assess the service for health and performance issues.
On-premise infrastructure is protected using the ASR process and configuration appliances which can be installed on existing hardware and scaled if needed.
Network connectivity: The ASR service integrated directly into VMware or Hyper-V to access the protected workloads, replication into the cloud takes place via the clients internet circuit, failback replication requires VPN.

Benefits

Our DRaaS benefits mainly focus around allowing the client to concentrate on delivering their own internal business services whilst we ensure DR protection is efficient, cost effective and reliable.

We have listed some more of the key benefits below:

Scalability: Our service allows businesses to scale up or down their disaster recovery capabilities based on their specific needs. This makes it easy for businesses to accommodate their changing disaster recovery requirements, without the need for upfront investments in hardware and software.
Cost-effective: Our service is based on a subscription-based pricing model, which allows organisations to pay only for the services they need. This eliminates the need for organisations to invest in expensive hardware, software, and IT resources required for disaster recovery on-premises.
Time Savings: BaaS eliminates the need for manual backup processes and frees up IT resources to focus on other important tasks. This saves organisations time and effort, allowing them to be more productive and efficient.

Overall, DRaaS provides organisations with a cost-effective, scalable, accessible, secure, reliable, and time-saving way to manage their backup data in the cloud.

Outcome

Trent & Dove IT teams are now able to focus on the delivery of IT services to their own internal customers and tenants whilst knowing the A4S IT Operations Teams are maintaining disaster recovery capability for their business data and systems.

A4S continue to maintain the clients DR service and take part in routine recovery tests for the purposes of assurance.

About the client

Trent & Dove is an amazing business that provides life changing services to it’s clients and truly has an incredibly positive social impact.

Trent & Dove is a charitable organisation who’s staff are devoted to improving the lives of its tenants and other in the surrounding areas.

We recommend reviewing their ‘about us’ section for more information: https://www.trentanddove.org/about-us/

Client statement

“I am very impressed with the Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution provided by the A4S team.

The ability to replicate our critical systems and data to the cloud in real-time, and the flexible recovery options available to us, have given us the confidence that we can recover quickly from any disaster.

The cost savings, scalability, and security benefits of the DRaaS have exceeded our expectations, and the testing and validation process has given us peace of mind that our disaster recovery plan is effective and can be executed successfully in the event of a disaster.

Overall, we are extremely satisfied with the A4S provided DRaaS service and the level of service and support provided.”