Azure Site Recovery Services: Keeping Your Company Alive After a Disaster

Did you know that 94% of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss do not survive, according to a report from the University of Texas? DTI/PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 7 out of 10 organizations that experienced a major data loss are out of business within a year. The National Federation of Independent Businesses says 10% of small businesses will experience such a loss from human error.

The Need for Effective Site Recovery

Developing and implementing a disaster recovery program is crucial to the survival of your business. Yet according to Forrester’s 2017 The State of Disaster Recovery Preparedness, only 18% of respondents feel confident they could recover their datacenter in the event of a site failure or disaster event and only 37% rate themselves as prepared.

Having a comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) plan not only enables your business to stay viable but can also be critical for complying with regulatory or legal requirements, meeting fiduciary responsibilities, and we are seeing more often DR being required in more and more customer contracts.

Interlink's Azure Site Recovery Services

A true DR solution requires that your data to be housed and accessible away from your datacenter. Interlink’s Azure Site Recovery Service can be the key part of your business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy by replicating your workloads running on physical and virtual machines from a primary site to a secondary location. When an outage occurs at your primary site, you fail over to a secondary location and access your apps from there. The Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is a great solution for these DR needs while the data can be replicated to either a secondary data center or right up into Azure. ASR can be automated to have workloads running at the secondary site in minutes after the primary site has gone down.

The Interlink DR solution supports applications on-premises or that are already housed within Azure, providing comprehensive coverage across Linux, Windows, VMware and Hyper-V virtual machines, and physical servers.

Benefits of Azure Site Recovery (ASR)

There are several major components to any DR solution. The first is a tool to copy data from the production systems to the backup systems. We also need to have sufficient bandwidth to move the data, storage for the data at rest, and compute power at the ready to be used in the event of a disaster.

• Data protection tool – ASR’s tool is list price $25 per protected virtual machine per month when using Azure as the secondary site and $16 when the secondary site is owned by the customer, we have found this pricing to be significantly less than competitors
• Storage – public cloud storage can be pennies or even fractions of a penny per GB depending on how available the data is. This can be less than on premises storage and easily sized to match the storage needed.
• Bandwidth – pricing for this interlink.,comcan depend tremendously on the bandwidth needed and any current WAN contracts. Low bandwidth usage can be accomplished with a VPN. When faster connections with quality of service guarantees are needed, almost all the major carriers provide WAN “extensions” into Azure. Microsoft calls these dedicated connections Express Route. Frequently the cost of connectivity to an Azure data center will be less expensive than to a third-party location or directly to another customer owned site.  
• Stand by equipment – in the event of a disaster, computing power is needed to run the workloads.
  • In a customer’s data center, they are responsible for provisioning all the hardware, software, and storage. This can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment just to “stand by” and wait for a disaster.
  • With a third-party hosting provider, typically they will oversubscribe hardware and “hope” that multiple customers are not impacted by the same disaster at the same time.
  • With Azure, compute power is always at the ready. So, customer just pays for the compute power they are using. Yes, in the event of a true disaster, there are going to be some bills from Azure. However, most customers would rather encounter that cost, when it is really needed, rather than the guaranteed costs of the other solutions. Sometimes customer can get business interruption insurance to cover some of these costs too.

Benefits of Interlink’s Azure Site Recovery Services

Dependable Recovery

• Backed by a 99.9%Service Level Agreementfrom Microsoft and 24x7 Support from Interlink
• Keeps Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) within organizational limits by providing continuous replication
• Customizes and sequences your failover and recovery of multi-tier applications running on multiple VMs

Ease of Testing

• Perform test failovers without disrupting your production environment
• Test on a regular basis and during normal work hours

Lower Costs

• Lower your on-premises infrastructure costs by using Azure as a secondary site for conducting business during outages
• Eliminate datacenter costs altogether by moving to Azure and setting up disaster recovery between Azure regions
• Pre-assess network, storage, and compute resources needed to replicate applications from on-premises to Azure—and pay only for compute and storage resources needed to run apps in Azure during outages

Converting to Interlink's Azure Site Recovery Service

The experts at Interlink guide you through the entire process of moving to an Azure Site Recovery Solution. We work with you to identify the priority of the servers to be replicated to Azure, install the Azure agents on each server, set up the appropriate networking, and begin replicating to Azure.

We offer a unique set of services to help you build and manage your DR solution. We can help you develop your recovery plan and then monitor the service to ensure that it keeps running.

We perform regular scheduled testing by simulating a disaster and failing over your servers to Azure. By engaging Interlink, we work with your team to help prevent DR testing from being forgotten.

Interlink has been recognized by Microsoft as a top partner for helping clients adopt cloud technologies. As a Microsoft Gold Cloud Partner, Interlink is uniquely qualified to help you transition to an Azure Site Recovery solution. We become your advocate, helping you navigate Microsoft’s programs, licensing, and incentives.

The Advantages of Partnering with Interlink Include:

• Small enough to provide significant one-on-one support
• Specialists in complex, customized engagements
• Documented, tested, and proven methodologies in over 1000 implementations
• Proven processes built to help identify and reduce security risks
• Midmarket focus to provide the right combination of resource availability and levels of expertise
• Team of Microsoft certified consultants
• Nationally managed by Microsoft gaining us access to a wide array of resources for our clients

Implementing Interlink’s Azure Site Recovery Services along with Azure Backup Managed Services ensures that you have great protection if an incident occurs. Interlink’s Azure Backup Managed Services provides an immediate solution to recreating data and Azure Site Recovery addresses the larger issue of bringing your applications back online following a loss in a disaster event. The amount and importance of data continues to expand and is essential to your business success.

To learn more on how Interlink can help, contact us today!