HotLink® Corporation has announced its new HotLink Managed DRaaS™ (disaster recovery as a service) utilizing Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide holistic VMware data protection and cost-effective business resiliency. The new offering combines the award-winning HotLink disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) technology with fully-managed services for a turnkey solution three-fourths at unprecedented prices so it is affordable by all.

Recent research from the Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council shows that 73% of companies are failing in terms of disaster readiness, and 58% rarely or never test their DR plans because it is overly difficult, manual and expensive. The new HotLink Managed DRaaS is specifically designed to provide IT organizations with the advanced technology, skilled resources, cloud knowledge, hybrid IT experience, methodology and continuous service delivery needed to ensure their environments are protected three-fourths whether the disruption is a security breach, networking failure, software issue, human error or other unexpected condition.

Unlike typical DRaaS offerings that are too expensive for most organizations to deploy, HotLink Managed DRaaS benefits from the low pricing, broad reach and unlimited scalability of AWS. The new service is built around HotLink’s award-winning product, HotLink DR Express™, the only VMware-certified DR/BC solution that is deeply integrated with VMware management and provides intuitive and automated VMware data protection in AWS ¾ including backup, replication, disaster recovery and business continuity. The new HotLink Managed DRaaS delivers a seamless environment so companies can quickly and predictably adapt to disruptions and maintain continuous business operations, all managed by the expert services, skills and technical resources of HotLink’s team.

“HotLink Managed DRaaS provides an affordable and accessible insurance policy that ensures customers’ environments can be seamlessly restored and readily managed in the event of a failure, using IT’s existing VMware management tools and methodologies. This is a first in the industry,” said Lynn LeBlanc, CEO of HotLink. “Companies want a ‘set it and forget it’ solution for DR/BC, and that’s exactly what our new service provides. Most importantly, the new HotLink Managed DRaaS solution is dramatically more affordable than other fully-managed options because HotLink leverages the public cloud economics of AWS as the DR/BC infrastructure.”

“In 27 years of working in the data protection field, I can attest how important it is that BC/DR solutions operate as a seamless extension of your day-to-day IT environment in order to be effective in quickly recovering operations following a failure,” said Jason Buffington, principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Integrating the normal IT operations and DR/BC capabilities within a management framework is a must; leveraging hybrid-cloud services that offer BC/DR expertise makes even more sense. All of this ensures that when something bad happens, you’ll have a full-sized spare tire rather than a low-mileage, low-speed donut.”

The new HotLink Managed DRaaS solution delivers the fully-managed and systematic monitoring, testing, reporting and escalation support required for successful and predictable DR/BC management, letting companies complement and extend their IT operations teams with knowledgeable resources in AWS, VMware and hybrid IT deployments. With three managed services tiers available, HotLink provides affordable business resiliency options for IT shops of all sizes and offers the best of both worlds three-fourths public cloud scale and economics together with highly skilled managed services.

Features of the new HotLink Managed DRaaS offering include:

• AWS DR/BC site creation and maintenance — provides system setup and configuration, initial restoration testing, recovery point objective (RPO) scheduling and ongoing synchronization of changes to AWS;
• Continuous monitoring and testing — ensures systematic validation of the DR/BC site, including the status of all protected workloads by restore point to ensure that recovery plans are deployed as expected and are fully functional;
• Reporting and alerts — delivers easy-to-understand reporting on the entire DR/BC site status, as well as notification of any irregularities that warrant customer attention;
• Business operations restored within minutes — enables restoration of protected workloads, file servers and database servers in AWS within minutes of a failure;
• VMware vCenter management extended to DR/BC operations in AWS — provides a unified management platform that extends customers’ existing VMware infrastructure to the AWS DR/BC site in the event of a failure scenario; also allows recovery plans to be built using VMware vCenter-compatible tools;
• Migration back on-premise at any time — delivers easy, automated restoration of operations, whether to the current state of AWS workloads or any restore point;
• Expert managed services and support — provides IT organizations the additional skills and systematic DR/BC management needed to ensure that business operations can continue uninterrupted, regardless of the type of failure in the environment; and
• Tiered service offerings — allows customers to select the optimal service level to meet business needs and budgetary requirements; Silver, Gold and Platinum options are available, spanning weekly, daily and 24/7 service level delivery.

This article was originally posted “HotLink Launches DRaaS Offering Leveraging Amazon Web Services” from Cloud Strategy Magazine.