Posted by Travis Nisbett
Hosting.com, Sr. Product
Manager
There’s a very common saying – disaster happens. Actually, that’s not the saying, but it is close enough. And disasters come in a variety of flavors – everything from people making mistakes to horrible disasters like hurricanes. In any case, when something happens, you want to be ready for it and be able to continue moving forward. That’s true in our personal lives, and it’s true in the business world.
Drivers have auto insurance for that very reason. Insurance provides the funds necessary to continue to be able to repair a vehicle after an accident. Hopefully, insurance is something you won’t ever need.But it provides peace of mind in the meantime. In some locales, regulatory compliance means that you must carry insurance.
Hosting.com has been working with VMware to provide insurance in the form of Disaster Recovery services to our customers. These services provide organizations with the ability to operate mission-critical business solutions quickly after a disaster interrupts operation. Historically, when a disaster occurred, it took a great deal of time, energy, and resources (both human and capital) to get those business systems back up and running. In addition, there are intangible costs such as loss of reputation and brand equity, as well as impacts on customer satisfaction. Thanks to Cloud Replication, a service for disaster recovery that utilizes VMware’s SRM 5 solution, companies can now have replacement systems operational in a very short period of time (often less than 15 minutes) with very little data loss.
Hopefully, a disaster doesn’t happen and you won’t need to implement the disaster recovery. But what about that peace of mind? Cloud Replication from Hosting.com includes non-disruptive testing capabilities so that you can test your disaster recovery plans at your leisure – according to a set schedule or whenever your systems change. And just like the situation where some government agencies mandate auto insurance to remain in compliance, some oversight organizations require disaster recovery planning and testing of such plans to remain in compliance.
The Hosting.com Customer Portal makes such testing quick and easy. A single mouse click on the “Test” button starts a test. This causes no interruption to the production system. And the results of the test are readily accessible in a report that shows all recovery steps and their success or failure (see screenshot below). That provides the peace of mind that IT managers want and need.
The following chart provides a picture of the test output in the Hosting.com customer portal. As you can see, this provides a clear illustration of the test results that can be utilized to ensure RTO / RPO targets are being met and also to provide to third parties for compliance purposes.
Cloud Replication from Hosting.com provides disaster recovery services that used to be available only to the largest organizations. The fact is all companies run mission-critical applications and need a cost-effective way to protect their data. Cloud replication is a fast, secure, and affordable insurance policy.
For more information on Hosting.com’s cloud-based disaster recovery solutions, please register here for the DR to the Cloud webinar on May 17th featuring experts from VMware and Hosting.com or watch the video below from the Hosting.com Cloud Replication webpage.
