Disaster Recovery Costs: In-House vs. DRaaS

To reduce stress on business operations, more companies are resorting to SaaS providers. They offer solutions that are easy to implement, easy to use, and on a scalable contract (monthly or yearly). In this blog, we are comparing the costs of setting up disaster recovery internally versus outsourcing disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). Let’s determine which one makes more sense for your business.  

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Note that the values are in Canadian dollars. 

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The cost of Disaster Recovery as a Service 

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A DRaaS service provider will evaluate and assess your environment in order to determine your resource utilization. This is important in order to provide a similar environment to host your applications and services.  The compute, storage, and memory will be considered. The dedicated resources vary from one business to another depending on what they are actually running. Let’s look at a rough estimate based on the many clients using DRaaS services with AIT. To replicate and host between 40 and 50 virtual machines, our customers on average pay between $2,500 and $3,500 per month. This includes licensing, compute, memory, and dedicated storage. Therefore, a DRaaS solution costs between $90k and $126k over three years.  

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In-House Disaster Recovery Costs

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The estimation is for 40 and 50 virtual machines.

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Servers 

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The first task of setting up disaster recovery in-house is to create a second infrastructure – a second physical location. As a result, you need to contact your hardware manufacturer or reseller of choice for all the required gear. You’ll also need personnel to maintain and manage, secure and monitor the hardware. We are considering the cost over three years because the amortization of hardware on average is approximately 3 years. The total cost for servers and maintenance over 3 years is about $25,000 (for two Servers).

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Networking Equipment 

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To set up the secondary site, you’ll also need new switches, firewalls, routers, establish logistics so it connects to your main site. The cost to set this up and have someone maintain it is about $10K over a 3-year period.  

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Windows Operating Systems 

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The cost of Windows Licenses Operating Systems Licenses is about $7k over three years. 

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Virtualization Software 

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Virtualization means having many virtual machines on one piece of physical hardware. In order to do this, you need hypervisor licenses. An example of a vendor is VMware. For 3 years, this is about $10K

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Storage 

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Storage SAN for Server to be able to Power-On which is $40,000.

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Secondary Datacenter 

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Now you need facilities to store the hardware. Including electricity let’s use a conservative number. That is $20,000 over three years.  

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Connectivity 

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The facilities need a dedicated link to your primary site. The telecommunication costs to that the secondary site including internet costs could reach about $10,000 for networking and bandwidth. 

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Replication Software 

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Software Licensing to replicate from the primary site to the secondary site is about $5000 for a 3-year period. 

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Implementation 

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Implementation costs include labor and maintenance of the secondary site (internal or consulting costs). A maintenance example is patching firmware upgrades. The cost over three years is $15,000. 

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Monitoring 

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Monitoring the uptime, availability, and performance of the secondary environment is crucial. Over 3 years, this is approximately $3,000.  

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Final Cost 

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Over a 3-year period, in-house disaster recovery costs a minimum of $145k. 

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Other Reasons to Choose DRaaS

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The minimum cost for in-house disaster recovery is $145k. However, the cost is not the only factor to consider when taking on a huge project. Here are 5 reasons to consider DRaaS even when prices are comparable: 

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1. In-house disaster recovery requires a large upfront investment. 
2. Setting up Disaster recovery in-house takes time. You won’t be able to protect your data immediately. 
3. DRaaS is a done-for-you solution. Internal responsibility is removed and the plan is set in motion almost immediately. 
4. DRaaS gives the responsibility to the experts. It relieves your staff from these tasks so they can focus on other tasks.  
5. It’s easier to scale when you’re not creating the secondary site yourself.  

Ready for DRaaS?  

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You’ve come to the right place! At Assurance IT, we are experts in disaster recovery. Serving businesses of all sizes, we would be happy to discuss how we can help protect your data and your business. Contact one of our data backup and replication specialists. If you need more time, sign-up to our monthly newsletter to keep in touch.  

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