UKCloud launches Disaster Recovery to the Cloud service

UKCloud launches Disaster Recovery to the Cloud service

London – 11 April 2017 – UKCloud, the easy to adopt, easy to use and easy to leave assured cloud services company, has today announced the launch of Disaster Recovery to the Cloud, a self-service replication and recovery solution, powered by market leading disaster recovery software provider, Zerto.

As UK citizens increasingly expect to be able to access services online, around the clock, it has become even more important for public sector departments to invest in a back-up plan in the event of their local data centre suffering an outage or service disruption. Available across all government networks, Disaster Recovery to the Cloud enables public sector organisations to use the award-winning UKCloud platform as a cost-effective environment to recover from IT failures.

The service mitigates a wide range of failure scenarios that can affect a local data centre – including power cuts and natural disasters – as well as providing protection against application failures, including unsuccessful software updates, and malicious cyber attacks. The innovative Zerto technology enables customers to easily roll-back cloud-based virtual machines (VMs) and workloads to a known safe state, allowing services to be restored rapidly, minimising downtime and data loss.

“It is crucial for our public sector customers to ensure that in the event of a disaster, their essential public services would face little or no disruption,” said Simon Hansford, CEO of UKCloud. “Having a disaster recovery plan in place is mandated by the Civil Contingencies Act, but traditional disaster recovery solutions are expensive and inefficient. We’re delighted to be offering this new service, which will help our customers meet their business continuity objectives with a flexible and cost-effective solution.”

Once an organisation has implemented Disaster Recovery to the Cloud, protected applications are seamlessly and securely copied and stored on the UKCloud platform, which acts as the recovery site. In the event of an application being compromised, the organisation is able to quickly recover the application to the UKCloud platform and, in so doing, make the service available to office-based users as well as mobile users (to mitigate the risk of the entire office or site becoming unavailable).

Disaster Recovery to the Cloud is based on a pay-as-you-use cloud model; organisations can select applications that are crucial for the provision of public services, and therefore only pay for the disaster recovery or business continuity that is needed.

Hansford added: “Disaster Recovery to the Cloud has been specifically designed with our public sector customers in mind. It is ideal for protecting sensitive data and services that are depended on by UK citizens, patients and public sector workers.”

With Disaster Recovery to the Cloud, organisations can:

 

• Replicate services and data from their existing data centre to UKCloud, thereby ensuring critical public services can survive local IT failures or other disasters
• Deliver business continuity and disaster recovery plans with recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) that meet their individual requirements
• Easily validate disaster recovery and business continuity plans, by safely simulating them without disrupting live workloads or risking loss of data
• Use a self-service portal to control their own recovery processes and self-restore entire applications from any point in the journal

 

In addition to providing assurance, UKCloud’s Disaster Recovery to the Cloud will also help the public sector to embrace new technologies and digitise services. For instance, organisations who are looking to transition to the cloud but are hesitant about the impact on business operations, can use the service to test workloads on the UKCloud platform, whilst continuing to provide live services from an existing data centre. Organisations can also control the timing of their switchover and be assured that applications can be failed-back to their original state should any unforeseen problems arise.

UKCloud is exclusively focused on the UK public sector market. The company is fully UK sovereign and its services have been optimised for OFFICIAL and OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE data. Furthermore, UKCloud is the only cloud provider to be connected to all government networks, including the Public Services Network (PSN) and N3/Health and Social Care Network (HSCN).

For more information about UKCloud’s Disaster Recovery to the Cloud, please click here, or if you want to join our webinar on Friday 28 April, click here.