What Is Disaster Recovery As Service (DRaaS)?

 Disasters can be devastating to any business. From a natural disaster to a cyber attack, these incidents often mean that data and applications are down for days, if not weeks. This can have serious financial consequences, destroying customer loyalty and damaging brand reputation.

Most organizations cannot afford the loss of critical information, which means that they must prioritize their data and applications to protect what’s most important – the ability to continue serving customers. This requires careful planning and testing to ensure that all business processes can failover and return to normal operation if something goes wrong.

This is the essence of disaster recovery as service (DRaaS). It’s a cloud-based service model that allows companies to back up data and applications offsite for the rapid recovery of business operations in case of a local technology failure. DRaaS can be offered by a technology vendor, an IT managed services provider (MSP), or by a combination of both.

When selecting a DRaaS solution, the most important factors are to choose one that can meet your RTO and RPO requirements. This requires care when evaluating the provider’s infrastructure backup and virtual servers hosting capabilities. This type of DR is typically used for medium to large enterprises that have complex IT environments and mission-critical workloads that need to be protected from man-made or natural disruptions.

The three primary DRaaS models include managed, assisted, and self-service. In a managed DRaaS model, the third party assumes responsibility for all aspects of your disaster recovery plan, including failover and failback processing. This can be billed on demand, or through ongoing retainer agreements. An assisted DRaaS model allows the third party to offer its expertise in optimizing your disaster recovery plans, but you must take on responsibility for implementing some or all aspects of the DR plan.

A self-service DRaaS option gives you the opportunity to implement your own disaster recovery plan using a set of pre-built, virtual servers hosted in a remote location. This can be an affordable alternative to more expensive managed DRaaS. However, it’s imperative that you test your disaster recovery process regularly to ensure the virtual servers will failover and return to normal processing in the event of a disaster.

To achieve fast failover, the best DRaaS solutions use advanced imaged-based virtual machine (VM) replication to send VM images to your service provider’s DRaaS environment. These VMs can be booted in the same way as your local server VMs, which will allow you to get up and running quickly. These solutions also use agentless components, which eliminate the need for software to be installed on each individual server. This makes them easier to manage and faster to recover from. The scalability of the cloud infrastructure also makes it easy to increase the capacity of your DRaaS solution as your business grows. You should also look for a provider who offers automatic backups on a regular basis to help you meet your RPO and RTO requirements.