Disaster recovery is the restoration of normal operations after any type of business interruption. While most businesses think “disaster” refers to floods, storms, fires and other unexpected environmental events, the most common causes of business interruptions are from human error, equipment failures, and malware. While those three threat vectors are the most common, ransomware is on the rise, causing over $5 Billion in damage 2017. Moreover, at least 20% of small and medium sized businesses who paid ransomware never recovered their data.

When your systems go down it costs you money. According to ITIC, a single hour of downtime costs enterprises an average of $100,000 to $300,000. A small or medium size company will average 7 hours of downtime at a cost of $8,600 per hour. Downtime annoys, and sometimes loses, customers. While most backup services will help you recover files, true disaster recovery will help you rapidly restore systems, such as email, HR, inventory, customer service and other software your company depends on.

It is similar to the Software as a Service model, in that it is an on demand service. Unlike pure SaaS models, however, most DRaaS providers also require hardware purchases and licencing agreements, making them more expensive and difficult to manage. This really defeats the purpose of an “as a Service” model.

Using these traditional DRaaS services, not only are organizations forced to buy hardware, they also need to monitor, manage, and maintain the service they deployed. This adds to the workload for already stresseed IT and staff resources, taking time away from other important initiatives. As a result, these back up systems aren’t always updated, the hardware isn’t always maintained and the system is rarely tested. When a disaster does occur, staff may need to scramble with an untested, antiquated solution that may not successfully recover data and systems.

Even companies who outsource these jobs, are still paying dearly for it. MSP or IT professionals still need to devote significant resources to ensuring backups are running regularly and smoothly and recovery is quick and effective.

Managed Disaster Recovery as a Service means that the service provider itself – the one whose only focus is backup and recovery – is managing your services. All system maintenance and testing is included in the service itself. It is a true “as a service” model.

When you buy Managed Disaster Recovery as a Service from Sky Data Vault all hardware, software, and network components are included. We provide 24/7/365 service and recovery. MDRaaS can be entirely cloud based – though some clients may want to add local hardware depending on their size, complexity and Recovery Time Objectives.

With MDRaaS, one support call initiates a quick recovery from any data loss or system recovery. Unlike most of our competitors, we can initiate a recovery remotely. That means you don’t have to wait for a technician to arrive on site. That means we can offer some of the fastest recovery times in the industry. You’ll have confidence in your ability to recover from any loss without any further effort on your part.

MDRaaS is a great offering for MSPs and Agents for their clients because there’s no upfront hardware to buy or maintain and services are in easy to understand flat fee models. It is more profitable for the Partner, eliminates complexity for all parties, and delivers incredible service to clients.

A Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is a measure of how up to date your backups are. It is the maximum amount of time between backups. The time between backups is the maximum amount of work that is at risk in a disaster. SDV technology is unique in the industry in that we can support RPO on a server by server basis. That means you could, for example, have one mission critical application that has a one-hour RPO, and also a Print server that just needs once daily backups.

One size does not fit all. With Sky Data Vault you can customize RPOs based on the requirements of your organization.

The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum time it takes to restore the organization to full operational status after a loss or interruption. Sky Data Vault’s service portfolio allows the you to choose the right RTO for your organization.

SDV offers a full range of options. We can deliver near real-time recovery on a local Sky Data Vault managed recovery appliance (BDR). We can have your systems at the ready in under 15 minutes in the secure SDV Cloud. We offer several configurations to meet your urgency and budget requirements. Please call to discuss your specific needs with one of our experts. We are happy to suggest options in clear language that will meet your needs.

Snapshotting was originally intended as a way to create “moment in time” back ups of a system prior to making changes to the network. As an ongoing back-up methodology, it has some inherent problems.

Snapshotting begins by taking a baseline backup of everything on the system. It then takes “snapshot” images of your entire system based on your RPO, or frequency of back-ups. As it is a whole-system image, the size of the back-up can be a large drain on the network and your bandwidth. Then these “snapshots” need to go through a complicated merge process in order to keep a current baseline image that is ready to be restored in case of a data loss.

Be certain to ask your Disaster Recovery provider if they use Snapshotting.

The vulnerability here is that if anything happens to any of the incremental snapshot images – either during a back-up or during a merge – you’ve lost everything. You will have to start over with a new baseline. This kind of snapshot failure is not uncommon.

“File and Folder” is a proven backup methodology that has been used for decades as the standard for backing up a network. Similar to Snapshotting it starts with a baseline image of the systems you are protecting. That is where the similarity ends.

The incremental backups are executed in an entirely different way. At each backup point, File and Folder scans the system for updated files and folders. It captures only these changed files and folders. It is vastly faster and more efficient, using vastly less bandwidth and storage space for each backup than a snapshot will. The merge is far, far less complex – and less likely to fail.

Here’s the big advantage – if any files were to be corrupted or lost during the backup, the rest of the files remain in tact. So even if there were a massive failure mid-backup, your losses would be minimal. Your backups are far more reliable and fast.

Be certain to ask your service provider if they use the File and Folder backup method.

We partner with software sales agents to provide the best possible offerings to their business clients. Our sales agent partners are technology experts that advise organizations on technology and software options in the marketplace. Sometimes referred to as “Expert Generalists”, organizations look to these Partners to offer unbiased recommendations on the best way technology can meet the specific challenges of the organization.

We make life easy for our Agent partners by giving them clear, easy to understand information and by supporting the entire sales cycle.

MDRaaS is an immediate revenue growth opportunity for Agent Partners. It is a great introduction to many cloud services your clients want today. Sky Data Vault does all of the sales and engineering support on the front end Discovery and Scope process. We handle all of the onboarding for the Partner clients and manage any necessary migrations. Partners who sell SDV MDRaaS have an easy sale, a satisfied customer, and a growing revenue stream.

A Managed Service Provider (MSP) offers small, medium and enterprise sized clients outsourced IT services. Organizations reach out to MSP’s for everything from help desk support, software development, and even virtual CIO (vCIO) planning and support. They become the a trusted partner for all aspects of technology within an organization.

MDRaaS is a an excellent solution for MSP’s looking to improve their offering while reducing costs and complexity. Because you do not have to buy any hardware up front, you profit immediately from the sale. Our MSP partners average fewer than ONE trouble ticket per client per year. That saves you time so that you can build your business.

Sky Data Vault offers a private label service on a flat monthly fee. You can offer true MDRaaS that supports your clients while keeping your brand front and center.