Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

Protect critical business programs with a reliable and secure tools.

Protect your business and your data.

The primary purpose of a network is to allow interconnectivity within an organization as well as with the outside world. To secure your workforce and ensure the optimal operation of your organization’s functions, all sectors should function properly. When network services are disrupted or when you lose organizational data as a result of such a disruption, operations will cease and may even result in business coming to a standstill. This is true regardless of the industry or type of business – your business will be unable to continue with its most important tasks without internet and interconnectivity.

Network Recovery as a Service

Comprised of:

Planning
Backup as a Service (BaaS)
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

A network recovery plan (which forms part of NRaaS) is vital to disaster recovery and business continuity planning even more so with a remote workforce as is currently the case for many organizations. Traditional disaster BC/DR solutions offer full network recovery of the local area network. But unless they are also the client’s Internet Provider (ISP/carrier), they cannot offer full NRaaS. Stage2Data offers the best of both worlds.

Our Business Continuity Services

As cloud adoption continues to grow among small and medium businesses (SMBs), Microsoft Azure has emerged as a popular option.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) on Azure

Let’s take a look at the benefits of remote work for both employees and employers.

Azure boasts one of the most comprehensive portfolios of compliance offerings among cloud providers, covering global, industry, and government-specific regulations including GDPR, HIPAA, NIST, FedRAMP, and more—making it easier to meet your regulatory requirements.

Multiple Azure cloud services offer integration with open-source software and development platforms such as Linux, Kubernetes, .NET, and more. This provides a future-proof platform that enables you and your technology partners to develop and run workloads more flexibly and innovate more freely in cloud-first, on-premises, and hybrid setups.

To meet their portion of the shared responsibility model, many businesses use one of the following solutions:

  • Azure’s native single-cloud backup and recovery services: Services offered
    by Microsoft to enable local- or geo-redundant backups and recovery within
    the Azure network.
  • Third-party BCDR tools in Azure: Independent software vendor (ISV) offerings
    that protect data natively in Azure.

While these solutions are suitable for many organizations, they may not fully address challenges related to protection, cost, and management. That’s why our partner Datto worked with Microsoft to develop Datto Continuity for Microsoft Azure (DCMA) -- a BCDR solution designed for SMBs and supported by MSPs like us.

Protection: Single-cloud solutions are susceptible to downtime

Downtime can limit revenue and prevent employees from working. Thus, maximizing uptime is key to business success. Using a single-cloud solution to accomplish this poses some risk for business continuity:

  • Worldwide outages: If all your business-critical workloads are in Azure, they are susceptible to downtime in the event of a widespread outage. This is one of the issues with using an Azure-based backup solution, rather than an independent one.
  • Ransomware: It’s common for organizations to only back up important data using native tools available in Azure. However, this means those backups are all behind the same login screen and can potentially be held hostage in the event of a ransomware attack.
  • Daily backups: While common, daily backups mean you risk losing up to a full day’s worth of data. Plus, if your solution doesn’t offer backup verification, it can be difficult to prove that a previous backup was successful and is bootable.

Protection: Multi-cloud backups

To alleviate these concerns, you can use multi-cloud backups through a solution
like DCMA to:

  • Stay up and running during Azure outages: DCMA provides backup and
    failover to the Datto Cloud with no extra fees for data egress.
  • Gain extra protection against malicious attacks: Backups are kept secure
    behind a separate cloud portal located outside of Azure for additionalassurance of safety.
  • Verify hourly backups: More frequent backups and verification means you can
    better optimize your recovery point objective (RPO) and confirm your backups
    are both working and bootable.

Cost: Unpredictable spending

As you begin to move your business to Azure, it’s important to understand the differences in resource costs and payment models compared to on-premises infrastructure. Migrating to Azure enables organizations to shift from CapEx to OpEx spending models—meaning you pay only for what you use in the cloud.

While this shift can bring about newfound flexibility to many organizations, it also brings some unpredictability in cloud spending month to month. This is a concern for your business whether you pay Microsoft directly or purchase Azure services through an MSP like us that must build these costs into its own fee structure.

Here are some costs you need to prepare for as you move to the cloud:

  • Cloud service and resource usage rates
  • Virtualization costs for disaster recovery (DR) testing and failovers
  • Data egress fees for cross-region/cloud recovery and replication across clouds or exporting data from the cloud to on premises storage

Also consider the costs that could be associated with a security breach. Threats like ransomware attacks and the associated downtime and data loss can all lead to huge financial and productivity costs for a business. downtime costs alone have risen 486% since 2018.

Cost: Navigate cloud economics with more predictability

The costs associated with cloud services can be hard to anticipate. When using DCMA, all of the following is included in the flat-rate fee:

  • Data egress
  • Virtualization of workloads to Datto Cloud
  • Disaster recovery (DR) testing

Features like these allow you to know what you’ll be spending each month with greater accuracy.

Management: Making it simple

There are many BCDR offerings suitable for businesses running workloads on Azure. However, the majority of these offerings were built for an in-house IT team to manage independently. For an SMB, the point of working with an MSP is to delegate details like ensuring that data is backed up and can be restored quickly. Using a system designed with that partnership in mind is better for us because we manage BCDR for many businesses — and ultimately better for your business because they can serve you more efficiently.

Management: Streamlined efficiency for SMBs and MSPs

Using a solution such as Datto Continuity for Microsoft Azure allows us to serve you effectively with features such as:

    • Single pane of glass: We can manage your on-premises and cloud Datto
      backups from one portal for greater ease and efficiency. Not having to switch between multiple platforms and monitoring systems means issues are less likely to go unnoticed or “fall between the cracks.”
    • 24x7x365 support: Having one unified solution means we don’t need to train and dedicate different staff on multiple platforms. Our entire staff can be proficient in the one solution protecting your business. If we cannot solve a technical issue on our own, we can tap single-vendor technical support, allowing us to save time and eliminate confusion when an issue occurs. Datto is a global organization and Microsoft partner that offers world-class support.

Disaster Recovery Services

Recovery options from four hours down to seconds.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) on Azure

Let’s take a look at the benefits of remote work for both employees and employers.

The primary purpose of a network is to allow interconnectivity within an organization as well as with the outside world. To secure your workforce and ensure the optimal operation of your organization’s functions, all sectors should function properly. When network services are disrupted or when you lose organizational data as a result of such a disruption, operations will cease and may even result in business coming to a standstill. This is true regardless of the industry or type of business – your business will be unable to continue with its most important tasks without internet and interconnectivity.

A network recovery plan (which forms part of NRaaS) is vital to disaster recovery and business continuity planning even more so with a remote workforce as is currently the case for many organizations. Traditional disaster BC/DR solutions offer full network recovery of the local area network. But unless they are also the client’s Internet Provider (ISP/carrier), they cannot offer full NRaaS. Stage2Data offers the best of both worlds.

Our Partners in Remote Office

Reimagine the way you work with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams – Chat, call, host online meetings, and collaborate in real time, whether you’re working remotely or onsite. Get one integrated solution including Teams, OneDrive cloud storage, and Office apps with advanced security for your business. 

Citrix Workspace provides a great user experience — a secure, contextual, and unified workspace — on any device. It gives you instant access to all your SaaS and web apps, your virtual apps, files, and desktops from an easy-to-use, all-in-one interface powered by Citrix Workspace services. 

Infomedia Systems Group through a portal provides centralized access to all of your cloud-based applications and helps everyone see all the tools that are approved and available for them to do their job. Helps stop one-off cloud purchases and multiple solutions to the same problem. Menus are fully customizable and assignable by groups within your organization. 

Remote Office: Benefits

Familiar and Easy To Use

Use the apps you’re accustomed to, in an easy-to-use and connected experience.

Integrated Solutions

Reduce cost and complexity with built-in capabilities that work across your  applications.

Built-in Security

Secure your people, data, files, and enable safe remote work with a secure and compliant foundation.