Disaster Recovery As Service
Disaster recovery as service is an approach to ensure business continuity with a cloud-based backup and failover solution. It’s a way to minimize downtime during natural disasters, power outages, cyber-attacks and human faults that cause systems or applications to go down. DRaaS is a new option that is more affordable and simpler to manage than traditional DR solutions, such as setting up secondary infrastructure on site or with a managed services partner (MSP).
Disaster Recovery is a set of technology, methods and processes used to recover the functionality of an IT environment after an event shuts it down. It replicates and hosts workloads in a third-party provider’s facilities to avoid downtime during a disaster and restores them when the incident has passed.
Organizations must test their disaster recovery plans to ensure they’re able to resume operations after an outage, but testing is often expensive and time-consuming. It also requires staff to monitor and troubleshoot the disaster recovery process to keep it up-to-date, and that adds to the cost of maintaining a disaster recovery plan.
Historically, creating a secondary infrastructure to support business continuity has been costly and complicated for most organizations. It involves setting up a secondary site with all the hardware, storage and power requirements needed to run production workloads, which isn’t feasible for many businesses. This has limited the number of companies that can afford to protect their data against outages and maintain a zero-data-loss strategy.
Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) are two of the most popular models enabling MSPs to offer high-availability solutions for their customers. While BaaS offers a simple backup-only capability, DRaaS uses the pay-as-you-go infrastructure of public cloud providers to provide failover and recovery capabilities, democratizing disaster recovery and making it available to more teams that couldn’t afford or manage a dedicated secondary data center in the past.
The most important factors to consider when evaluating DRaaS are RTO and RPO. The RTO is the maximum amount of time you can allow for your systems to be down. The RPO is the maximum amount of data you can tolerate losing when recovering from a failure.
Ultimately, it’s up to each organization to decide which DRaaS model is best for them and their budget. The three primary DRaaS models are managed, assisted and self-service. Managed DRaaS provides a complete disaster recovery solution managed by a third-party vendor. It includes replication, hosting and orchestration of the disaster recovery workflow. It’s typically offered through a subscription or on-demand basis, and the responsibilities of each party are recorded in a service level agreement. Organizations that choose this model are looking for a turnkey solution. Assisted DRaaS is similar to managed but is for organizations that require help or assistance with their DR workflow. This is usually a great option for smaller teams that can’t justify the expense of a fully managed DRaaS provider. Self-service DRaaS is what it sounds like, an option for organizations that want to handle their own DR but need a vendor to assist with the implementation or support. disaster recovery cloud services