Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

The backups provided by Venom IT are copies of your data that are stored off-site. However, if something untoward happened at your offices (e.g. flooding or fire) that ruined your workstations, your data would be safe but you still might not necessarily be able to work.

Backups are also a cheap option to keep your data secure.

But disaster recovery provides a means to carry on working regardless of what has happened. This is where hosted desktops come in. You’ll have access to a hosting desktop from anywhere with reasonable internet, using pretty much any device (Windows, Mac, Linux, Chromebook, Android).

To illustrate the difference: imagine the flooding of your offices, made completely unsafe with no electricity. Because even with backups, you still can’t work.

If on the other hand, you had full disaster recovery, you could provide your staff with laptops and let them work from a central location that has Wi-Fi. Alternatively, you could send everyone home and ask them to use their home computers to connect to the (virtual) office network.

In short: you could be up and running again within a very small space of time.

Venom IT offers various deals and packages for disaster recovery. It’s best to discuss this with one of our staff so that we can ascertain your needs and create something that fits your budget and circumstances.

Typically the questions you should consider are:

• First, how will we communicate internally?
• How will we communicate externally?
• How will we access our documents and continue working?
• Where will we accommodate our staff?

We provide several solutions such as Skype for Business, VoIP phone systems and hosted desktops, as well as supplying hardware to suit your needs.

A disaster recovery plan is meant to provide the full functionality of your business, on short notice, during time of distress. Really, that means all your work data should be included in the disaster recovery solution.

That depends on the level of disaster recovery solution. A full-suite solution can have you up and running within a couple of hours (or even minutes) whereas a partial solution can take a day or more to set up and deploy. Also, bear in mind that during times of disaster such as flooding, IT companies experience a huge demand for service. That can mean a partial solution could take even longer to deploy, whereas deploying a ready-to-go solution would take much less time.

Lastly, let’s look at 3 methods: Off-site backup, cloud backup, and full cloud-based infrastructure.

From the above, you can see that budget is a strong determining factor. But all things being equal, the obvious best solution is a fully cloud-based infrastructure.