Table of Contents
No business is immune to a disaster, and having the right recovery plan in place can save you from data loss, out-of-budget expenses, and reputational damage. However, implementing and maintaining an in-house solution can be expensive and time-consuming.
Consider disaster recovery as a service to streamline your process and improve your capabilities. Unlike traditional backups, DRaaS includes IT infrastructure.
Cost-effective
Having a disaster recovery plan is essential for any business, but it can be costly to implement an in-house system. Whether you have to set up a back-up site or invest in equipment that can handle peak workloads, implementing a full disaster recovery solution is a major undertaking.
With DRaaS, you can avoid the cost of deploying hardware to keep up with your production workloads by using an as-a-service model. This model allows you to use the capabilities of your cloud service provider and eliminates the need for a secondary data center.
In addition, you can save money by automating your DR plan. This includes powering down underutilized instances and moving your backups to longer term, lower-priced storage options. You can also avoid unnecessary bandwidth charges by leveraging server virtualization and WAN-optimized replication. This will reduce your costs and improve performance. Moreover, a third-party monitoring solution can detect anomalies and notify you when something is wrong.
Scalability
One of the most compelling advantages of disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is its scalability. Unlike traditional backup and recovery systems that rely on hardware to store replicated data, cloud services are scalable to match business needs. This flexibility eliminates capacity problems that can bog down old-school solutions and saves businesses money by avoiding unnecessary hardware purchases.
DRaaS enables enterprises to back up data and transfer computer processing to an alternative location when a disaster occurs. It also helps companies reduce downtime and improve Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) by allowing them to restore lost data with minimal disruption.
Moreover, it also eliminates the need to buy and deploy additional hardware at a secondary site and simplifies management by outsourcing it to a third-party vendor. DRaaS is also more cost-efficient than a traditional hot or warm site because the recovery resources are only paid for when they are used. In addition, the scalability of DRaaS allows the provider to quickly increase or decrease computing capacity depending on business demand.
Reliability
If you choose a reliable disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) provider, you can be confident that your business will stay up and running even in the event of a disaster. A reputable provider will ensure that your data is protected from unauthorized access and offers multiple layers of security to safeguard your business. They also test their processes regularly to make sure that they work as intended.
DRaaS uses a remote vendor to replicate and host your business’s production environment, including hardware and software, in a backup data center. This eliminates the need to invest in an expensive and complex second data center. It also reduces the risk of downtime due to human error or natural disaster.
When selecting a DRaaS provider, check whether they have SLAs for uptime. You should also verify that they can meet your specific recovery time objectives. These may vary from application to application. For example, some applications can tolerate a few seconds of downtime, while others require immediate restoration to avoid irreparable damage.
Flexibility
Disaster recovery as a service enables businesses of any size to protect their data and IT infrastructure from disasters. It offers a scalable, cost-effective, and streamlined approach for businesses that would otherwise be unable to afford to invest in a disaster recovery solution.
It eliminates the need to establish a separate and costly secondary data center for disaster recovery. It also reduces network and storage costs with WAN-optimized replication and global data deduplication. It also provides granular backups of individual applications, servers, and virtual machines in addition to complete IT infrastructure.
Typical DRaaS users are medium to large enterprises with complex IT environments and mission-critical workloads that cannot tolerate downtime or data loss. This type of technology helps ensure that the business can continue serving customers, even after a disaster or cyberattack. Businesses can opt for a self-service DRaaS model that requires the organization to handle all of the planning, testing and management, or choose a fully managed DRaaS model that is outsourced to a third party.