When a mid-size company considers refreshing or upgrading its IT infrastructure, the IT procurement team tries to figure out how it can extend the life of some of the hardware. At best it ends up with reusing the same servers or storage boxes for a year more. Or some boxes get virtualized and used for non-critical usage. But with cloud becoming a reality, there is a way to extend the life of ageing hardware, and get some more juice out of your IT investments for a disaster recovery plan.
Move the enterprise IT to the cloud, and re-use your existing IT setup for disaster recovery. How does that work?
When a company does an IT refresh or upgrade, it’s usually with a view to improve performance. Instead of wasting Capex on infrastructure that will become obsolete in a few years, companies can now consider moving their IT setup to the cloud and get the infrastructure they need on an OPEX model. This way they get the performance they are looking for at a fraction of the price, minus the headache of managing the setup. Connectivity costs will go up, but even that will only be a small increment in OPEX.
So what happens to all the boxes they have all over their premises? And what will the IT team do?
Two words: Disaster recovery.
Indian mid-size companies now have a cost effective way to get a disaster recovery services setup in place, especially those companies that do not need the high-end setup to run absolutely mission-critical applications that can’t miss a beat.
The existing infrastructure can be re-architected to run those applications and machines that are important for the business. This way work doesn’t come to a standstill even if there is an outage of the connectivity, or an issue with the cloud service provider. Your infrastructure takes over and the most important processes continue without a blip.
So far disaster recovery has been seen as a cost intensive exercise for those businesses with absolutely mission-critical applications that service millions of customers at a time. With growing cloud adoption, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is now a reality and has come much closer to other companies as well. Now, with a combination of the cloud for the main IT setup and the existing IT infrastructure for a Disaster Recovery Plan, all enterprises can now seriously consider having their own DR setup. It’s exactly what Indian businesses need in these times of natural disasters, power outages, local disturbances and political rallies.
If you would like to explore how to reuse your IT setup for DR, drop us a line or leave a comment below.
