
All-weather Disaster Recovery Plan
It’s essential to develop a disaster recovery plan that accounts for any weather-related disaster or other event, as well as one that ensures resiliency.
You’ve decided to pursue a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution for your organization. The c-suite is on board. You’ve received preliminary budget approval, outlined your requirements, conducted research, and narrowed down the field of prospective providers. All that’s left to do is make your final choice of cloud service provider (CSP) and sign the contract, right?
Not so fast. No matter how much “due diligence” you’ve done, there are still some very essential considerations. The IT industry is full of acronyms, and the considerations for DRaaS solutions include a few of them, starting with the service level agreement or SLA.
It’s not enough that a DRaaS solution is backed by a SLA — even if a prospective CSP boasts that it’s “industry-leading” or employs some other superlative. The SLA will do you no good if it doesn’t clearly address your specific requirements.
All DRaaS SLAs should include definitions of what their promised recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) are. RPO refers to the point in time in the past to which you will recover. Recovery Time Objective RTO refers to the point in time in the future at which you will be up and running again.
Just as all DRaaS solutions are not alike, you can expect a great deal of variation in the SLAs provided for them — starting with the definition. Some service providers consider an SLA to define the service they will deliver. For others, it defines the service promised and includes the provision of a service credit if that promise is broken. It’s important to note that not all services are backed by a credit remedy.
Here are a few other general things to keep in mind regarding SLAs and contract issues for DRaaS offerings:
FREE: 12-point DR Planning To-do List
Of course, there are several other things to consider when evaluating a DRaaS solution. Many of them will come up when you involve the various stakeholders in your organization in the process. However, if you’d like more information on evaluating DR solutions and the associated SLAs, US Signal’s solution engineers are available to help. Just call us at 866.2. SIGNAL or email [email protected].
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