How to Get Started With Acronis Disaster Recovery Cloud

As Vice President and General Manager, Disaster Recovery Services, Mark Jameson is focused on empowering partners and clients across the globe to grow and protect their business with Acronis disaster recovery solutions.  Mark has built over 30 years of experience in the disaster recovery and information technology markets with companies such as nScaled, SunGard Availability Services, Unisys and IBM.   

Acronis has announced the availability of Acronis Disaster Recovery Cloud to enable our Service Provider partners to deliver disaster recovery services to their clients. You are using Acronis Backup Cloud, but you now ask yourself why should I use Acronis Disaster Recovery Cloud and how do I get started? I would like to help you answer these questions.

Our world is continuing to become more and more dependent upon an exponentially expanding wealth of data. Even if you are not thinking about disaster recovery, your clients are! So why should you use Acronis Disaster Recovery Cloud to deliver Disaster Recovery as a Service to your clients?

• Rapidly growing market – According to MarketsandMarkets the Disaster Recovery as a Service marketplace will grow from $1.7B in 2016 to $12.5B in 2022. This growth is not limited to just enterprises, but more and more mid-market and small businesses are considering cloud-based disaster recovery solutions.  
• Easy – Acronis Disaster Recovery Cloud is delivered through the same easy-to-use console that you already are using with Acronis Backup Cloud. The additional disaster recovery functions have the same touch and feel as Acronis Backup Cloud.  
• Quick – There is no waiting to deploy an infrastructure to start providing disaster recovery services. You or your clients can add disaster recovery to any backed up server or virtual machines in just seconds.  
• Client retention – Acronis Disaster Recovery Cloud is built on top of the world’s easiest and fastest backup solution. Acronis Disaster Recovery Cloud is just one of the Acronis Data Cloud services that you can upsell to your clients to provide them a full suite of data protection. The more services they use from you, the less likely are to move their business elsewhere.  
• Revenue and margins – There is no CAPEX to start providing disaster recovery. Straightforward pay-as-you-go pricing allows you to build upon your Acronis Backup Cloud to incrementally grow your revenue and margins.

So now that we have established the “why”, let’s talk about the “how”.

Getting started with Acronis Disaster Recovery Cloud is very simple, just follow 8 simple steps.

1. The right target market: Acronis Disaster Recovery Cloud is designed to protect servers and virtual machines. If your Acronis Backup Cloud clients are protecting servers or virtual machines, then they are candidates for Acronis Disaster Recovery Cloud. You can add disaster recovery to all of your clients and all of their machines, or start with just one machine for one client. You are in control of how you grow your business!  
2. Legal terms and conditions: Acronis Disaster Recovery Cloud comes with new terms and conditions that need to be added to your agreement. If you have not yet received your new Acronis Disaster Recovery Cloud legal language, please contact your Acronis or Cloud Reseller representative. Once this step is completed the Acronis Disaster Recovery Cloud functions will be enabled and you will be able to begin using.  
3. Read the user guide: You will find a disaster recovery section added to the online Acronis Backup Cloud user guide. We encourage you to review this new section to get an understanding of the disaster recovery functions that are now available to you.  
4. Install VPN agent: So you are ready to start using the new Acronis Disaster Recovery Cloud functionality. The first thing you need to do is download and execute the easy to use VPN agent that is available in both VMware and Hyper-V versions.   This process should take you about 15 minutes and only needs to be done once. While your data is already moved to the cloud by your existing Acronis Backup Cloud replication, this VPN connection enables you to extend your production environment to the Acronis cloud to facilitate easy failover, server access and automatic discovery of you production IP network attributes.  
5. Add disaster recovery to servers and virtual machines: Adding disaster recovery to machines backed up with Acronis Backup Cloud only takes seconds. All you have to do is choose the appropriate machine, select 1 of 8 standard configurations available, confirm the production and test IP addresses automatically discovered, confirm a couple of other optional features, include optional description information and hit done.  
6. Set up always on servers: For those who may need to house a server in the Acronis cloud to support such needs as Exchange DAGs, SQL Mirrors, virtual appliances, etc.; these always-on servers can easily be set up in seconds much the same way that you added disaster recovery to machines backed up with Acronis Backup Cloud.  
7. Add backup to your cloud machines: Not only can you run machines in the Acronis cloud, but you also back them up. Whether a machine that was backed up or added as always on, every machine running in the Acronis cloud is also backed up within the Acronis cloud.  
8. Failover and test failover: You are now ready to either execute a live failover of a machine in the Acronis cloud or perform non-disruptive testing of a machine failover. With just a few clicks of the mouse and a few minutes you will have machines running in the Acronis Cloud!  

Well, I hope that this has helped you understand the “why” and “how” of Acronis Disaster Recovery Cloud, but the help does not stop here. Acronis is here to help our partners in growing their business with Acronis Disaster Recovery Cloud. To find out more about the Acronis Disaster Recovery Cloud service I invite you to visit the Acronis Disaster Recovery Cloud product page to find more information and contact your Acronis or Cloud Reseller representative to get a quote or request a demo.

Look for future blogs about Acronis Disaster Recovery Cloud and growing your disaster recovery business. If you can’t wait for the next blog you can always email me at mark.jameson@acronis.com.