Most Severe Economic Damage Is caused By Disaster’s, Now It’s The Time to opt for Azure Disaster Recovery. There are multiple options in the market for site recovery but today we are going to discuss why you should go for Azure Site Recovery. Azure Site Recovery pricing is much less as compared to other solutions, we will discuss it in detail in this article and tell you what Azure Site Recovery costs you if you opt for it.
Things You Should Know Before digging Into Azure Disaster Recovery
Disasters happen and sometimes you can’t do anything to stop them. Recovering from a disaster could cost you a lot of money and sometimes your reputation that you have earned over the years as well. Wouldn’t it be wise to have a Azure disaster recovery plan to get you back on your feet in case a disaster strikes? Before you think about that, you need to know what a disaster recovery plan is. The answer? Azure Disaster Recovery.
It is well established that most businesses today depend on technology for routine tasks. Email exchange, inventory, supply chain, accounting, everything has now gone tech based. And there are companies who are nothing but tech savvy. Look at Uber, Airbnb and so many more.
If a disaster occurs, it could put your business to a halt whether you are a tech-based business or use tech services to execute your business tasks.
You must be thinking that my business is all right and what could go wrong. We hope that it never does but there could be floods, hurricanes, fire, or manual disaster like an employee who accidentally leaked critical information. Have you ever thought about having a backup plan if something like that happens? If you have not yet now is your chance.
What to Include in the Plan?
A complete disaster plan should be detailed. It should include everything from how you are going to get out of the office in case of emergency to how you are going to smoothly run your business after the disaster.
It would be icing on the top if you took your plan a step further and thought about ways you could run your business even during the disaster. You would have, what one calls, an ideal disaster recovery plan.
While it’s important to customize a plan for your business, every plan should include:
Manage What you Can’t Control
If you ask what is a disaster recovery plan? The answer is managing your business in unfortunate conditions. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong according to Murphy’s law. You may not like it but, it is a fact. It makes it even more important to know how your recovery plan would unfold. Off course your IT department could always figure this out but, a business decision maker, there are a few things to consider about what your disaster recovery plan covers. A few questions:
How Cloud is the Best Solution?
Let’s be straight that when a disaster hits, machines are least of all worries for humans. Automation is the savior of business in such situations.
Cloud is a solution that can help you recover as fast as possible. It is inexpensive and you don’t need to manage your own datacenter for recovery and backup. It is the best possible solution for small to medium businesses with limited budgets. But it doesn’t mean that large enterprises cannot take advantage of its benefits.
Not all cloud providers are equal, so you’ll need to do some research to compare. A few considerations:
How Cloud is the Safest?
Off course you have heard of companies having lost data even in clouds in a disaster.
It is true but it is not because the cloud failed it is because the company chose to store their backup in only place in the same geographical location as the company’s. They took too much risk.
Microsoft cloud offers geo redundancy. It means that your data is stored in more than one place at different geographical locations. Now you can run your business operation even during a disaster as the data is available all the time.
What you Need to do Now?
Now that you have come to know the fundamentals of what a disaster recovery plan is, we’d love to meet you and discuss your plans for keeping your business running. If you’re ready right now, we’re happy to set up a free consultation to review your plan.
Evaluate an Azure Disaster Recovery Plan for your Business
Sounds a little dramatic but if there was a fire in your office and you could save only one thing what could it be? Obviously not that flower vase or lamp. You may want to save something that could help you recover your business after the fire. It is important to evaluate a disaster recovery plan for your business. An Azure disaster recovery plan includes which data you want to save on a priority basis and which data you will need during or immediately after a disaster. And not to forget it also includes classifying data your business can survive without.
Classify What Is Crucial and What Is Not
When you create your Disaster Recovery plan, you’ll need to weigh the trade-offs between complexity vs. costs. What data can you afford to be without? For how long? If you lost some data, would that destroy your business forever? To evaluate a disaster recovery plan, you need to set priorities in case of disaster.
While creating a disaster recovery plan you need to weigh your options. You need to evaluate what data you cannot absolutely afford to lose at any cost? What data you’ll be wanting during or immediately after the disaster? Is there some data that doesn’t need to be saved because your business can survive without it?
Consider the Following to Evaluate a Disaster Recovery Plan
1. Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
PRO is a calculation of data that you are willing to lose. You can classify your data into categories including the one you can’t afford to lose and the data you can let go of. You might want to keep your record of purchase orders at high priority, but you could set your lists of office furniture to the data of least priority.
2. Recovery Time Objection (RTO)
RTO is an assessment of the time duration that your business can survive without data. You could decide how many hours you can delay your business operation in case of disaster. The shorter the time is, the higher is the cost. So, it is important that you consider all your options carefully.
3. Personnel
You may want to categorize your employees according to the urgency of the operations they perform. Which employee should get their data first? Who will be in charge in case of disaster? Who is the backup resource for backup? How much of your backup can you leave to human intervention which man not be available all the time in case of disaster?
4. Regulatory Constraints
How are you going to ensure that all compliance policies are abided by in operations performed during disaster?
5. Critical data
You need to analyze which data is critical for running a business and which departments are dependent on what data for running their operations.
Test and Train
Often, companies make a disaster recovery plan and that is it. They do not test the plan or train the persons for hypothetical disaster scenarios. As a result, when the disaster hits, the plan fails whether it is a storm, a fire or cyber-attack. The plan is of no use if it is not rehearsed enough to be put into action in case of disaster.
Business requirements, resources and circumstances shift over time. From location to employees to data. It is important to evaluate a disaster recovery plan and test it at least twice or thrice a year to ensure that it is in tune with your business goals and up to date.
After you have figured out your plan, train all personnel associated with the plan. To ensure that your plan is successful in any scenario, make sure that the higher management agrees to the plan and endorses it.
Azure Site Recovery Pricing
Azure provides site recovery for both, the instance you are managing on-premises as well as the instances are on Azure. Pricing is different for both instances depending on where it is deployed.
On-Premises Pricing
Many organizations who managed all their instances on-premises do not have any disaster recovery plan. Disaster recovery plan is really especially important for business continuity, you never know what is going to happen next minute, so always be prepared for the worst, azure is providing you a solution for business continuity and the price you are paying for it is very minimal.
Location | Price For First Month | Price After First Month |
|---|---|---|
On-Premise Instance | Free | $16 /month per instance* |
On-Cloud Pricing
Organizations that deployed their infrastructure on cloud seem more secure as compared to the organizations using on-prem infrastructure, but this is not true. Although your data has already been replicated three times but still there is a chance of disaster occurring i.e. regional blackout.
So, in this case how will you continue your business? The first answer that clicks in my mind is Azure Disaster Recover. You should also protect your cloud instances using Azure Disaster Recovery as a Service. The price is a bit different in this case as compared to on-prem. The Azure disaster recovery plans can be as simple or as advanced as your business requirements demand.
Location | Price For First Month | Price After First Month |
|---|---|---|
Azure | Free | $25 /month per instance* |
*in addition to Site Recovery fee you will also be charged for Azure Managed Disks, in-bound out-bound traffic and transaction.
What will be the True cost if Disaster occurs?
In addition to Site Recovery fees, you are also charged for all storage, outbound data transfers, and transactions. You will only be charged for Azure VM usage during a disaster. Storage costs are only for the storage in use.
For Example:
Size of replicated VM created in Cloud: D4S-V3 VCPU’s 4 RAM 16GB IOPS 6400
Cost of the VM per Hour: $140.16 per month / 720 hours in a month = $0.1946/Hour
Storage on the VM = 1TB
Cost of Storage = $0.02/GB x 1000GB = $20/Month
In-Bound Data = Free
Out Bound Data = $0.087/GB
Approx. Out-Bound Data (When Disaster hits): 100GB
Cost of Out-Bound Data = $0.087/GB x 100GB = $8.7
Transaction Cost: $0.0005 / 10,000 Transaction
Approx. 1Million Transaction Per Month = $0.0005 x 100 = $0.05
Approx. Other Azure Resource Charges (At Rest) = $20
Approx. Other Azure Resource Charges (When Disaster Hits for 7 Days) = $100
Cost at Rest
Site Recovery Fee | Storage | Transactions | Other Azure Resource Charges | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
$25 | $20 | $0.05 | $20 | $65.05 / Month** |
Cost When Disaster Hits
Pricing for if disaster hits for 1 Day:
Site Recovery Fee | Traffic | Storage | Transactions | Other Azure Resource Charges | VM Charges | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
$25 | $1.24 | $20 | $0.005 | $23.33 | $4.67 | $74.24 /Month** |
Pricing for if disaster hits for 7 Days:
Site Recovery Fee | Traffic | Storage | Transactions | Other Azure Resource Charges | VM Charges | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
$25 | $8.7 | $20 | $0.05 | $43.33 | $32.69 | $129.77 /Month** |
Pricing for if disaster hits for 30 Days:
Site Recovery Fee | Traffic | Storage | Transactions | Other Azure Resource Charges | VM Charges | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
$25 | $37.28 | $20 | $0.5 | $120 | $140.16 | $342.94 /Month** |
*All the above prices are approximate. The prices are subject to your infrastructure.
**The prices may be extremely low or extremely high depending on your infrastructure, these are just estimated pricing.
To get estimated value for your infrastructure and find out more about Azure Consulting, get in touch.
Get Help to Create an Azure Disaster Recovery Plan
A cloud solution can help you find a good balance between cost and complexity. With Azure Site Recovery, you can easily create Azure disaster recovery plans in the Microsoft Azure portal. The Azure disaster recovery plans can be as simple or as advanced as your business requirements demand.
We’re here to help you with all stages of strategy, planning and implementation.
Last Updated 9 months ago
