Internet Solutions Adds DRaaS to SkyLight Platform

Internet Solutions has announced the addition of an DR service (DRaaS) to its SkyLight platform.

Brought to market with ContinuitySA (Pty) Ltd, an Internet solutions-owned company since 2014, the service offers RTOs – or the time required to restore systems – reduced to minutes. Recovery point objectives (RPO) – or the age of the files at risk – are meres. 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 websites 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 Graeme O’Driscoll, executive head, software engineering, 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 manmade catastrophe, such as a fire or power loss at a data centre or severe ransomware attack.

In the past, enterprise DR 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 SMEs.

“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 O’Driscoll.

SkyLight offers users cloud services from Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Internet Solutions Cloud and Dimension Data Cloud, with others to follow.

The firm’s DRaaS offering includes an advisory service to help companies evaluate their data requirements and dependencies, map a DR strategy, and then implement and test the resulting DRaaS plan.

O’Driscoll 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.