Budgeting for

a Disaster
7 Cost-Saving Tips for
Disaster Recovery

A natural or human-made
disaster can strike at any time.
If your organization isnt prepared, the cost of business
disruption can be enormous. Because no organization
can afford downtime, developing a disaster recovery
plan is imperative.
Its somewhat inaccurate to say that an organization wants to
avoid downtime at all costs. However, according to the Disaster
Recovery Preparedness Councils 2014 Annual Report, 60% of
companies dont have a full disaster recovery plan in place. Clearly,
there is a limit to what an organization will pay to ensure uptime.
With 20% of the companies surveyed indicating post incident

60%

of companies dont have a

full disaster recovery plan
in place

losses of more than $50,000 and up to $5 million, organizations

can no longer avoid investing in a complete plan.
Theres a myth that disaster recovery plans have to be expensive
and complex. The reality of the situation is that a disaster recovery
solution can be simple and cost-effective. So the question becomes,
how can an organization reduce disaster recovery costs without
putting their business in jeopardy?
Written primarily for the CIO, the CTO, and the IT manager, this
brief white paper highlights seven practical yet powerful tips for
reducing the costs of disaster recovery. In particular, it focuses

20%

on how to select a disaster recovery solution that provides your

business with the greatest return on your investment.

of the companies surveyed

indicated post-incident
losses of more than $50,000
and up to $5 million

2016 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved.

Budgeting for a Disaster - 7 Cost-Saving Tips for Disaster Recovery

1
Avoid Application Downtime
When businesses cant access missioncritical applications or information, their
operations are disrupted. And when
a firm cant operate, it loses profit. Its
reputation suffers, and clients turn to
the competition.

$1.25-2.5
billion

average cost of downtime

per year

2016 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved.

It might seem obvious, but application downtime costs

organizations money. A recent report by IDC and AppDynamics
examined the true cost of downtime and infrastructure failure.
The report found that for the Fortune 1000, the average cost of
downtime per year is $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion. Thats about
$100,000 per hour for infrastructure failure and $500,000 to
$1 million an hour for critical application failure.

Budgeting for a Disaster - 7 Cost-Saving Tips for Disaster Recovery

1
Avoiding downtime will save your
business money in the long term
Your disaster recovery solution should
enable you to prevent the expense of
downtime. Look for solutions that:
Offer continuous availability of disaster recovery software
through array-based clustering and synchronous mirroring that
duplicates all your mission-critical data on a transaction-bytransaction basis.
Provide disk-failure protection technology that is double-parity
and that prevents data loss even when two Disaster Recoveries
fail.
Use data replication software that creates recovery point
objectives ranging from minutes to hours and that protects your
data from mirrored data corruption by failing over to a specific
point in time in the Disaster Recovery copy.
Create point-in-time data and application copies that you can use
to protect datafrom a single file to a complete disaster recovery
solution.

2016 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved.

Budgeting for a Disaster - 7 Cost-Saving Tips for Disaster Recovery

2
Use Cost-Effective Infrastructure

$150,000
"Implementing a cloud-based
disaster recovery plan would save
my company $150,000"

2016 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved.

A significant part of saving money on your Disaster Recovery plan

is to choose cost-effective infrastructure. Leveraging a physical
data center for disaster recovery has its advantages, but it is also
associated with very high costs. According to the market research
firm IDC, in 2013 more than $6.5billion was spent worldwide for
on-premises data protection and recovery. For many companies,
this option is not feasible. They cant afford to build and maintain
such a facility, and thats not even taking into account the cost of
purchasing hardware and software or hiring storage engineers to
operate these systems.
Cloud-based infrastructure, however, is a lower-cost and more
realistic option for many businesses. Instead of building their own
data centers, companies rent virtual infrastructure in the cloud.
The total cost of ownership for leveraging cloud infrastructure is
lower many times over than the cost of constructing or using an
on-premises facility. In an interview with PC World, one director
of IT revealed that implementing a cloud-based disaster recovery
plan would save his company $150,000 over three years, mainly
because of cost avoidance.

Budgeting for a Disaster - 7 Cost-Saving Tips for Disaster Recovery

3
Reduce Network Bandwidth
and Storage Consumption
After your company has chosen a cloud-based disaster
recovery solution, some of the largest costs are network
bandwidth and storage consumption
Following are three ways to save money on network bandwidth and storage consumption:

Data compression
An affordable cloud Disaster Recovery solution should allow data compression. Look for a solution
that can compress your data by about 70% or more, which allows you to fit more data, systems, and
applications into a smaller space.

Deduplication
In most storage systems, data often consists of duplicate information that consumes a lot of space in
all storage tiers. Instead, a cost-saving storage solution looks at your data to find duplicate data that
does not need to be saved over and over again. The solution should then combine the duplicated data
to free up space.

Data transfer
Often overlooked, bandwidth costs for connecting your on-premises environment to the cloud
contribute to the overall price of a Disaster Recovery solution. For many solutions, the entire system
is replicated daily or hourly, regardless of the changes that are made to the system from the previous
backup. Look for a Disaster Recovery system that replicates only files, applications, and systems that
have been changed since the last transfer. This step can reduce bandwidth requirements by up to 90%.

2016 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved.

Budgeting for a Disaster - 7 Cost-Saving Tips for Disaster Recovery

4
Support Issue
Troubleshooting
A cost-effective Disaster Recovery solution also provides a
safe environment that supports issue troubleshooting and
new product development and testing while maintaining
business continuity.
To save money, look for a Disaster Recovery solution that:
Has the ability to develop and test applications faster by creating instant, space-efficient data
replicas that shorten design cycles and improve service levels.
Can replicate data volumes and datasets by using space-saving virtual clones. These clones can
be used for essential enterprise operations such as testing and bug fixing, platform and upgrade
checks, multiple simulations using large datasets, and more.
Leverages your disaster recovery infrastructure to perform failover testing without downtime.
Failover testing is crucial, because it determines whether a standby system is ready to handle
tasks to support business continuity during a disaster.
Offers simplified Disaster Recovery testing through checks and balances that automatically
check the efficiency of your disaster recovery system.

2016 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved.

Budgeting for a Disaster - 7 Cost-Saving Tips for Disaster Recovery

5
Avoid Fines by Meeting
Regulatory Compliance
Standards
A disaster recovery plan can actually save your business money.
Many governments have passed legislation that mandates
organizations to back up their data and applications in the event
of an emergency. If law enforcement officials discover that youre
in violation of these laws, your company could face heavy fines
and be forced to purchase new equipment for Disaster Recovery
planning.

SAVE
Money

A disaster recovery plan can

actually save your business
money

To comply with regulations, your Disaster Recovery system should

adhere to data retention and security guidelines. It should also
make legal e-discovery simple. Your IT staff must complete Disaster
Recovery testing regularly so that your business does not face fines
or other legal penalties.

Your disaster recovery system should also:

Enforce data confidentiality and security.
Retain tamper-proof data and offer efficient data storage.
Secure intellectual property and confidential information.
Look for a Disaster Recovery solution that comes with robust
authorization, access control, and logging capabilities. It should
also use data-at-rest encryption and immutability to help you
comply with data privacy regulations. Finally, your cloud-based
disaster recovery system should help you meet data retention
regulations, such as SEC Rule 17a-4, by creating WORM (write-once,
read-many) files.

2016 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved.

Budgeting for a Disaster - 7 Cost-Saving Tips for Disaster Recovery

6
Unify Storage
Simplifying your Disaster Recovery storage with a common set of
software and tools is highly cost-effective. It saves your IT team
the frustration, time, and cost of figuring out how to integrate your
companys flash, disk, and cloud into a single data management
foundation. Your Disaster Recovery solution should provide data
unification even in a hybrid cloud environment by using consistent
processes, features, and data management tools everywhere.

Look for a Disaster Recovery system that:

Unifies storage across on-premises and cloud resources, including
the private cloud and public cloud.
Simplifies data storage across SAN and NAS protocols, including
Fibre Channel, FCoE, iSCSI, NFS, and SMB/CIFS.
Unifies data across virtualized, UNIX, Windows, and Linux
environments, no matter how complex your configuration is.
To save money, your Disaster Recovery system should allow you to
consolidate and manage your data from a single storage system,
instead of from multiple locations.

2016 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved.

Budgeting for a Disaster - 7 Cost-Saving Tips for Disaster Recovery

7
Effectively Scale Your Disaster
Recovery Solution
The ability to scale a solution is important. It means that the solution continues to function well when
it changes in size or volume to meet user needs. Some IT decision makers believe that overscaling is
the best approach to being able to meet business needs. This approach isnt cost-effective, though.
Instead, it costs your firm more money, because youre paying for resources that youre not currently
consuming. Cloud-based infrastructure is all about flexibility and efficiency. It allows you to deploy
new services or run applications with varying usage needsand to pay for what you need, when you
need it. You will pay only for the storage that you use, as opposed to spending money on something
thats simply going to waste.

Choosing a Cost-Effective Disaster Recovery System

Some companies see Disaster Recovery planning as a cost to worry about rather than as an essential
tool for business continuity. What they dont realize is that its far more expensive to suffer a disruption
than to implement a solution that enables them to operate during a disaster. Using a Disaster Recovery
solution can save your organization money in the long term. A solution that supports storage
efficiencies and that enables you to troubleshoot, prevent downtime to the greatest extent possible,
follow regulations, rely on unified storage, and effectively scale will also be more affordable. NetApp
offers an innovative and effective data protection and disaster recovery solution that can help prevent
your operations from being brought to a standstill if damaging natural or human-made events occur.
Its disaster recovery solution, built on the NetApp Data ONTAP operating system, is the right choice
to help you recover fast in the event of system, site, or regional outage.

10

2016 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved.

Budgeting for a Disaster - 7 Cost-Saving Tips for Disaster Recovery

Learn more at
www.netapponcloud.com/disaster-recovery
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