Six steps to a successful DRaaS deployment

The purpose of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is to enable your business to continue functioning as quickly as possible without losing resources, even after any kind of major problem or disaster.

Many successful companies today ultimately rely on information technology to function in the cloud. Given this fact, establishing and maintaining a clearly defined disaster recovery plan is of paramount importance.

Predicting disasters is not easy, but there are steps you can take to protect your business. This article describes these steps so that you are prepared for any eventuality that may arise.

First, catalog all your business elements and understand how they depend on each other. This will help you quickly assess your priorities and better understand which elements are important to your business. Depending on the type of business, data can be more or less important. To categorize business elements by importance, simply use three types of descriptive ratings:

• Not required for the initial recovery phase.
• Although important to some extent, businesses can function even if productivity is low.
• It is essential to your business and your company cannot function without it.

Once you have evaluated your business elements, you can easily see which ones are important to your business and start preparing your DRaaS implementation according to your priorities.

By checking and evaluating your equipment and data, you’ll be one step closer to successfully implementing DRaaS into your business. Analyze and evaluate the most critical equipment and key data for your business in as much detail as possible. Once completed, you will have easy access to your important data at any time and in any situation. You also get a clear picture of how secure your equipment and data are.

There are three additional questions to consider.

1. What threats can impact each element of your business?
2. How likely is the system to be damaged by a particular disaster?
3. What is the probability that a certain disaster will occur?

One of the most important steps for a successful DRaaS implementation is choosing the right provider. The right provider should offer her DRaaS solution that fits your business needs. The process of implementing DRaaS must ensure an optimal and secure recovery solution. This means your provider must ensure that your data is safe and can be recovered at any time.

All DRaaS implementation types are characterized by recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). DRaaS plans change to balance required RTO and RPO settings with cost efficiency. The simplest DRaaS implementation is based on remote backup and is sufficient for a large number of users.

Advances in cloud computing and virtualization technologies further enable the development of IT infrastructure recovery as a service. DRaaS can be achieved in multiple ways.

1. Service recovery using portable data centers based on user backups.
2. Remote backup (or backup copies) as a cloud service to provide recovery of critical services.
3. A disaster recovery service that is cloud service platform independent and uses operating system level data replication to cloud computers.
4. DRaaS uses virtual platform-level replication from production user websites to the cloud. This setup is independent from the user’s storage infrastructure and has the potential to automate service recovery in cloud environments.
5. Disaster recovery replicates a user’s storage system volumes from their primary location to the cloud, enabling automated service recovery in cloud environments.

Once you have established an accurate recovery protocol, make sure all users are familiar with it. That way, everyone can respond appropriately in the event of a disaster. Step-by-step protocols are very important for business.

The final step is to monitor your DRaaS solution. You must continually ensure that the implemented DRaaS solution covers all critical business elements. Also, if we discover any flaws, we document them and change the implementation until we are sure that all critical elements are safe in the event of a disaster. Over time, your business will grow and change, and as you change, you will need to modify your DRaaS to best suit your needs.

Imagine a situation where your key business services are down for hours or even days. How big will the losses be? And how many customers are you likely to lose? Keep this in mind and develop your recovery plan.

If you have applied all the information provided above, your business will be able to easily recover from any kind of disruption that may occur in the future.

With Liquid Web, you can use Acronis Cyber ​​Backup to protect your cloud dedicated server, VPS hosting, or VMware private cloud environment from data loss. In the event of a disaster, your data remains safe and can be recovered faster than with regular backup plans. Additionally, Acronis Cyber ​​Backup does not consume any additional server resources, which protects your server from ransomware attacks.

Make your servers disaster resilient with Liquid Web today.