Recovery Point: Providing Integrated Cloud, Business Continuity, and Disaster Recovery Solutions

Recovery Point Systems, headquartered in Gaithersburg, MD, serves a diverse client base of Federal, State, and Local government agencies, as well as commercial organizations ranging from Fortune 500 to medium size businesses. The company offers cloud and disaster recovery solutions ranging from DRaaS to private/hybrid cloud, to colocation and to the ultimate, off-line, air-gapped solution of physical tape creation and offsite storage.

In a recent interview with CIO Applications, Marc Langer, President of Recovery Point, discusses how his company is leading the way when it comes to helping clients understand, navigate, and mitigate risk in disaster recovery.

What are the factors that propelled the outset of Recovery Point?

Recovery Point is a privately owned company, founded in 1999 as a data storage provider. As we continued to expand our set of business resiliency solutions, we listened to our clients’ needs and we evolved our offerings into areas like managed hosting and colocation, cloud hosting, backup and recovery, and consulting services. We continually add new services that meet our clients’ needs and the evolution of the market.

What are the trends and challenges prevailing in the disaster recovery space and how does Recovery Point help its clients deal with them?

There are several trends and challenges in the disaster recovery space, driven by the need for resilience. Businesses are becoming more aggressive with their Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) expectations, the two most important parameters of a disaster recovery plan. Also, while many organizations used to recover through a self-service approach, we see the “assisted” service delivery model gaining share as companies with more complex infrastructures (beyond virtualized x86 platforms) look to a level of managed services beyond what many DRaaS providers and public clouds offer. Many companies also don’t have dedicated resilient operations and staff, which remains a major problem. More and more companies are looking to providers to provide a fully managed application recovery with RTO/RPO SLAs.

We differentiate ourselves based on our demonstrated expertise with a wide range of platforms and solutions used for resilience and the underlying applications we protect, as well as the security characteristics of our infrastructure. We do this in a holistic way at a reasonable cost, providing both partial and full recoveries, as needed.

Customers’ success is the most meaningful measure of our performance, we are proud to be recognized for service excellence in Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for DRaaS

Could you detail Recovery Point’s disaster recovery services?

To avoid fragmentation, we developed a service portfolio that allows customers to have all their DR solution components under one contract. While it’s not necessary for customers to buy all of our solutions, we feel this approach makes the process simpler, transparent, and more affordable than it would be if there were multiple vendors involved.

Our resiliency solutions address the complete spectrum of disaster recovery and business continuity requirements, including traditional hot site DR; Cloud Hosting, Backup and Recovery, Colocation, and Consulting services. We also offer a full range of cloud consulting methodologies.

Please provide a case study describing how Recovery Point assisted a client in dealing with challenges pertaining to disaster recovery.

One of the country’s largest equipment distributors was rapidly expanding its IT infrastructure to support the growth of its business, but in an outdated, on-premises datacenter and without a DR strategy to support its critical applications with speed and simplicity. Our team analyzed their environment, established tiered RPO/RTO objectives tied to their business requirements, and engineered/ implemented an economical solution to meet the customer’s growing IT infrastructure. As a result, the customer significantly reduced its risk in day-to-day IT production operations, and its DR solution is now aligned with the business processes in the event of a full or partial loss. The customer also reallocated valuable real estate resources previously supporting IT operations to more high-value activities associated with the expansion of its core business.

How does Recovery Point distinguish itself from its competitors?

We work for the Federal government as well as the commercial sector and are one of the few that have as deeply embedded physical and logical security throughout its facilities, infrastructure, and processes. Very few vendors offer certified facilities through Uptime Institute, however, multiple Recovery Point sites have received formal Tier III certification.

We also provide FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act) accredited facilities to our commercial customers. Rather than carving out separate enclaves for Federal government agencies, we offer enhanced FISMA level protection to all customers. We are currently working towards FedRAMP accreditation. In addition, our network is protected with advanced firewalls and intrusion prevention, and data stored on our infrastructure is scanned continuously for malware and viruses.

We have a flexible and adaptable environment that enables us to compete with the larger, better known competitors and we attribute this success to our employees and their continuous efforts to ensure they deliver the best possible service to every customer that comes on board. Our leadership has been recognized by industry analysts, scoring us highest in ability to execute.