Disaster recovery service (DRaaS) is an innovative, less costly way to back up critical systems and recover them in the event of a disaster. Unlike backups that are usually performed on-premise, DRaaS solutions use cloud-based infrastructure that is more resilient and cost-effective in the face of an outage or disaster.
Whether from natural disaster, hardware failure or cyberattack, companies can experience significant revenue loss and damage to their reputation when the datacenter goes down for days or weeks. This can cause businesses to lose sales, erode customer trust, and jeopardize compliance with industry-specific regulatory requirements.
To help avoid costly outages and to improve the resilience of their IT environment, organizations should opt for a DRaaS solution that has WAN-optimized replication, doesn’t impact production workloads, and utilizes global data deduplication to reduce expensive network and storage costs. It is also important to choose a solution that allows for almost instantaneous failover and provides priority restoration of virtual machines and mission-critical applications.
The most popular DRaaS solution is hosted DRaaS, where your organization pays for a third-party vendor to host and manage all aspects of the DR planning and testing process. Small firms lacking internal DR expertise can find hosted DRaaS to be especially helpful since it can eliminate the need for costly equipment and resources that are necessary for running an on-site test site.
Another option for disaster recovery service is co-managed DRaaS, where your company is responsible for some of the DR planning and testing activities while relying on the third party for all other services and infrastructure required to back up and recover IT environments. This is typically the most budget-friendly solution, but it requires close collaboration between your team and that of the third party to ensure all necessary processes are in place for a quick recovery in case of a disaster.
In addition to selecting a suitable DRaaS provider, your business should develop a comprehensive disaster recovery plan that lists all data production and compliance requirements, aligns RPO and RTO with risk tolerance, and outlines regular testing and maintenance schedules. Ideally, your company should also select a solution that uses automated, cloud-based backups to provide the best possible protection of your critical IT infrastructure.
To prevent unnecessary outages and to increase the recovery speed of your IT environment, your organization should look for a DRaaS solution with an agentless component that automatically detects changes in server VM’s and sends the images to the service provider’s virtual servers. They will then boot those hosts in the cloud so you can quickly and easily recover from a disaster or outage. Additionally, you should consider a solution with image-based replication where your VM’s are sent to the service provider as snapshots and then rebuilt in the event of a disaster or outage. This will provide the fastest recovery of your applications. It will also allow you to use your existing software and infrastructure in the event of a disaster or outage.