If disaster strikes, will you be ready? What would happen if you had a system failure and lost access to your critical customer data for a few days?  How much would downtime cost your business? IDC Research has reported that infrastructure failures can cost enterprises as much as $100,000 per hour. Further, IDC also estimates that organizations can experience between 10 and 20 hours of unplanned downtime per year.

Underscoring the impact, another recent study of over 400 IT professionals found that more than half of companies (54%) report that they have experienced a downtime event that lasted more than eight hours in the past five years. Surprisingly, it wasn’t natural disasters that caused the most impact. Power outages and hardware errors were the biggest culprits.

Regardless of your organization’s size, the cost of downtime is high — and avoidable. While you can’t predict when the next hurricane may hit, or know when your application server may call it quits, you can be ready if you use a cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) solution. New cloud-based business continuity and disaster recovery solutions, often called Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service or DRaaS, can give you the peace of mind you need to overcome the unexpected. Here are four reasons why.

They are resource light. Cloud-based disaster recovery and business continuity solutions don’t require additional hardware to be added to your infrastructure, so there’s nothing additional to manage, update or upgrade. Cloud DR platforms are also very flexible and can be managed for you as part of a managed service solution, so they can literally be “set and forget.”

They recover on-demand. When a downtime event occurs, time is of the essence. DRaaS solutions offer the ability to fail over, when needed, to run your infrastructure directly in the cloud avoiding costly downtime as you restart or recover from any disaster scenario. Users and customers remain unaffected by the disaster and you retain the vital business continuity you need to minimize risk.

They are cost effective. When compared to physical DR solutions, such as building an offsite data center or running a redundant environment, DRaaS solutions are exponentially more cost effective. In addition, cloud-based DR solutions can be accounted for as an operating expense (OpEx) rather than capital expense (CapEx) giving you more control and predictability around your DR costs. The most advanced cloud-based solutions allow you to structure your DR investment to align directly with usage, so you only pay for what you need.

They are undeniably secure. Security is a key concern, especially when protecting critical workloads. The most advanced cloud-based DR and business continuity solutions use advanced security layers to ensure that your data is seamlessly protected. They will even ensure that all data replicated to the cloud is fully encrypted, in transit and at rest, so that only you can access it when needed.

Don’t let the fear of the unexpected keep you up at night. New DRaaS solutions offer the automated, cost effective, and secure protection you need to recover, when and where you need it. As a result, you can easily avoid the high risk and cost of downtime.