Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) allows organizations to back up their data and IT infrastructure to third-party cloud computing environments. We offer complete disaster recovery (DR) orchestration via Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to rebuild the functionality and accessibility of your IT infrastructure after a disaster. Disaster recovery planning (DRP) and business continuity planning (BCP) are often offered in conjunction with DRaaS. DRaaS is also known as Business Continuity-as-a-Service (BCaaS). DDraaS is a powerful addition to vCloud Director that provides disaster recovery and data protection.
What are the benefits of using DRaaS?
The most important benefits of Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) are:
Scalability
Scalability is a key advantage of cloud services over physical on-premises infrastructure. If your organization is looking to expand, you’ll want to expand your disaster recovery options as your organization grows. This can be very difficult with on-premises disaster recovery systems for a variety of reasons. Creating and expanding a non-cloud-based DR system requires some physical space.
When scaling up, purchasing the right equipment can be expensive. You can use DRaaS to constantly analyze your needs and modify and extend your system. With DRaaS, you can cover as many VMs, storage locations, sites, and databases as you need. And you can do it for much cheaper.
safety
In-house DR systems have become susceptible to hacker attacks, as many companies have had the hard time in recent years of putting sensitive and important data at risk of breach. Many providers now come with mandatory encrypted data storage, so using a cloud-based disaster recovery system from a private provider will give you a more secure backup of your data infrastructure.
flexibility
A quality that DRaaS shares with other cloud-based platforms is flexibility. DRaaS allows you to choose the most effective operating system, platform, management system, and backup tool. This means you’re not tied to any specific server, database, backup, or network technology. Additionally, you can select the restore destination and options, such as restoring specific files or the entire system. To develop a solution that fits your specific business requirements, you can also choose services that have resources available when you need them.
cost efficiency
In-house DR systems often consist of several expensive hardware components. DRaaS offers the same DR functionality at pay-as-you-go pricing. This is significantly less than the cost of building a cumbersome on-premises solution.
Additionally, the fact that DRaaS is offsite can lead to significant savings by allowing your organization to get back to business more quickly in the event of an IT failure. IT failures, even brief outages, can be costly to businesses. The biggest advantage of using an external service is that it saves the company money in the long run because he no longer needs to hire IT staff to manage internal systems.
Risk reduction
Reduce manual operations with automation and orchestration. This allows for relatively instant failover, ensuring preferred apps and virtual machines start correctly every time, reducing time to recovery.
compliance
With DRaaS, organizations now have access to the controls they need to monitor and protect their critical data, helping to keep their IT infrastructure in compliance with important compliance and regulatory standards. With DRaaS, businesses can provide regulators, auditors, and customers with a single view of where their data is stored, who controls and has access to it, who is backing it up, and how. All can be shown within the graphical user interface. Modern security measures and the added benefits of cloud-based services make this possible.
Decrease in demand for temporary staffing
Save your staff time with automatic failover procedures or make just one call to your DRaaS provider. This frees up employees to focus on income-generating projects rather than disaster recovery management and preparation.
What types of disasters can DRaaS solutions mitigate?
Disaster recovery planning is essential to ensure business continuity. Numerous disasters that can devastate IT organizations have become commonplace in recent years. DRaaS systems can efficiently mitigate major disasters such as cyber-attacks, hardware/software failures, power outages, and natural disasters.
How much does DRaaS cost?
What technical infrastructure is required?
DRaaS providers provide the infrastructure that serves as your disaster recovery site in the event of a disaster. A provider’s services often include software applications or hardware appliances that allow you to copy your data and virtual machines to the provider’s private or public cloud.
Third-party DRaaS providers also offer failover to cloud computing environments on a contract or pay-as-you-go basis. DRaaS requirements and expectations are stated in the Service Level Agreement (SLA). This allows providers to execute disaster recovery plans even in the worst-case scenario of a complete or near-complete outage for the affected organization. When a natural disaster occurs, off-site vendors are less likely to be directly and immediately affected than the affected company.
Are there any potential risks or drawbacks to using a DRaaS solution?
Although there are many benefits to deploying Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS), you should be aware of the potential risks and drawbacks. The main disadvantage of DRaaS is that the cost and effort of disaster recovery is outsourced. Clients must trust and trust their service providers to properly execute business continuity and disaster recovery plans and adhere to agreed SLAs as soon as they become aware of a disaster. A customer relies on her DRaaS vendor’s ability to provide sufficient security.
Another potential risk of DRaaS is that it requires more bandwidth. Although DRaaS vendors can manage intermittent DR occurrences, most providers require the ability to perform recovery operations for all clients simultaneously.
Which DRaaS provider is right for your organization?
Choosing the right Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) provider for your company is important to achieve the desired results. Even if the service is favorable, choosing the wrong provider can cause problems. The leading DRaaS provider protects your data and makes it quickly accessible after a disaster, eliminating the need to maintain storage equipment.
Before choosing a DRaaS provider, consider how your hosting infrastructure will integrate with your IT requirements. Important considerations when choosing a DRaaS provider for your organization include:
reliability
In the event of a major disaster, the resources and capabilities of the disaster recovery service provider are known. Most DRaaS solutions are created by public cloud providers, but even public clouds can experience failures. Learn about your contractual rights and how your company can react and recover in each case. A more likely scenario is that the DRaaS provider fulfills its promise but needs to catch up on its SLA.
capacity
Cloud backup services require sufficient bandwidth and resources to effectively manage data transfer.
recovery speed
The following factors affect how quickly a DRaaS provider can resume operations.
- RTO (Recovery Time Objective): The time it takes for a crisis to impact your Business Community Plan (BCP).
- RPO (Recovery Point Objective): Recovering business functionality requires sufficient time to prevent business continuity compromise or adverse effects.
To bring these goals closer to zero, you need to find a supplier that offers rapid recovery while adhering to a continuous data protection model.
compliance
Before making a selection, it’s important to ensure that the DRaaS provider and cloud backup option meet your organization’s compliance needs. The most important factors to note are:
- The FBI and state officials have launched the Criminal Justice Information Service (CJIS), a project to identify ways to secure criminal records, fingerprint records, and other data obtained by law enforcement agencies.
- Healthcare organizations must comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which sets requirements for protecting sensitive patient data.
- The Standard for Attestation Engagements 16 Type II (SSAE Type II) statement is a stamp of approval from a qualified auditor. It verifies that a company has complied with appropriate controls over financial reporting (SOC 1) and has maintained appropriate controls over a period of time (SOC 2).
position
Disasters can be regional. Therefore, cloud data centers must be located far enough away from the companies that use them to ensure recovery capabilities.
final thoughts
DRaaS is a great choice for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) or growing organizations that need the flexibility, internal resources, and bandwidth to handle this software and hardware. With DRaaS, you can avoid the excessive financial and operational expenses associated with building, equipping, and managing a separate data center. When these services are included in the SLA, DRaaS providers can virtualize their infrastructure to reduce storage needs and address data backup, security, and disaster recovery. Liquid Web also offers VMware hosting for all your virtualization needs.