Pan-African telecommunications services provider, Internet Solutions (IS) has launched a cloud-based recovery solution, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). IS is the first company in South Africa to offer a disaster recovery solution as a service.

“IS has improved the Recovery Point Objective (RPO)* by as much as 83%, compared to other traditional disaster recovery solutions, reducing the time from a standard 24 hour to just 4 hours, enabling businesses to be operational with less data lost, compared to traditional means” says Graeme O’Driscoll, Innovation and Technology Manager at IS.  

“The Recovery Time Objective (RTO)** is approximately 8 minutes, which means that the time it will take us to get the service up and running, enabling clients to fulfill their business objectives is now 96.6 % quicker than traditional offerings.  No other organisation in South Africa is able to offer this,” continued O’Driscoll,

The solution includes connectivity, hosting, network, licensing and hardware, with the ability to be managed via a single interface – saving companies cost, time and complexity of managing different service providers.

“When compared to the traditional way of managing disaster recovery, DRaaS removes the complexity of building a disaster recovery environment away from clients. Our expert engineers manage the hardware and software, providing more business value making it simpler and cost effective in today’s dynamic environment,” explained O’Driscoll.

DRaaS enables clients to replicate critical applications and data in one virtual environment (primary site) in Johannesburg to a separate disaster recovery site that is effortless and timeous. At the click of a button, clients can enable continuous replication of their virtual machine, regardless of size, operating system or application. DRaaS has also moved replication from the storage or application layer to Hypervisor layer allowing replication of individual virtual machines or virtual machine groups quickly and easily.

“We have added a Service Level Agreement (SLA) on the RPO to ensure peace of mind for our clients and it also serves as a guarantee on our delivery promise”.  

“Another added benefit is the ability to perform test failovers and view reports on the state of the replicated virtual machines. Our clients will also be able to view performance statistics – giving them the ability to test and invoke their disaster recovery strategy on demand, without the need for lengthy, costly simulations”, says O’Driscoll.

“Because DraaS is a managed service solution, it reduces risk, provides agility and reduces complexity for clients, enabling them to focus on their core competencies which in turn improves productivity”, concludes O’Driscoll.

Internet Solutions has been voted the biggest VMware Service Provider Program (VSSP) partner in South Africa for four consecutive years for delivering outstanding performance in delivering virtualisation and cloud solutions.

*Recovery Point Objective (RPO) which refers to the amount of data at risk based on time

**Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the duration and service level in which business processes and data must be restored after a disaster or disruption.