Johannesburg, 07 Feb 2019
Internet Solutions, the leading ISP, has added an industry-leading disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) to its SkyLight platform.
Brought to market with Continuity SA, an Internet Solutions-owned company since 2014, the service offers recovery time objectives (RTO), or the time required to restore systems, reduced to just minutes. Recovery point objectives (RPO), or the age of the files at risk, are mere seconds. This is substantially less than industry-standard RTO and RPO of days and hours.
As cloud-hosted business systems are increasingly the norm, the difference between minutes and days in the event of catastrophic system failure is the difference between a company surviving a disaster, or not.
"For an online-only retailer, the longer their Web sites are down, the more revenue they lose. While some businesses can survive losing a day or two's worth of data, online retailers and financial institutions, for example, cannot," says Basha Pillay, Executive Head of Cloud and Collaboration at Internet Solutions.
"We're justifiably proud of the RTO and RPO standards that we can now offer to clients as part of a cost-effective, flexible cloud solution that puts DRaaS in reach of smaller companies that are as vulnerable to disasters as any large enterprise."
'Disaster' refers to a complete loss of business systems, from files and applications to entire data centres, due to a natural or man-made catastrophe, such as a fire or power loss at a data centre or severe ransomware attack.
In the past, enterprise disaster recovery involved frequent backups onto tapes stored offsite, with some companies investing in extra hardware and infrastructure capacity to quickly replace failed systems. These measures are slow by modern standards and prohibitively expensive, out of reach of small and medium enterprises.
"With DRaaS added to the SkyLight platform, any company with on-demand access to public or private cloud services from the SkyLight mega-cloud has the means to securely restore their data in just minutes," says Pillay.
SkyLight currently offers users cloud services from Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Internet Solutions Cloud and Dimension Data Cloud, with others to follow.
Internet Solutions' DRaaS offering includes an advisory service to help companies evaluate their data requirements and dependencies, map a disaster recovery strategy, and then implement and test the resulting DRaaS plan.
Pillay explains that clients frequently underestimate the impact that catastrophic system failure could have on their business, or they miscalculate the cost of disaster compared to their perception of DRaaS costs.
"Our job is to help clients identify business-critical data that points to which systems must be restored almost immediately, the order in which systems should be restored, and how to trigger their disaster recovery plan when required," he says.
DRaaS through SkyLight is offered as a completely self-managed service via the SkyLight platform, or clients can retain Internet Solutions to manage the service on their behalf. Clients may elect to manage some aspects of disaster recovery internally, while Internet Solutions' DRaaS experts administer the rest.
The Silver service package includes:
* Technical recovery plans;
* Consistency group verification;
* Notifications and escalations;
* Two tests annually;
* One invocation annually; and
* Quarterly service meetings.
The Gold service package includes:
* Technical recovery plans;
* Consistency group verification;
* BCM programme alignment;
* Notifications and escalations;
* Four tests annually;
* Two invocations annually; and
* Monthly service meetings.
"Cloud computing offers companies of all sizes tremendous advantage from a financial, operational and sustainability perspective," says Pillay. "The same is true of disaster recovery; the cloud and the Internet combined make recovering from system disasters easier and more accessible than ever before."
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