What is Disaster Recovery As a Service in 2022?

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) allows businesses to outsource data loss mitigation. DRaaS uses a cost-effective combination of cloud and hardware technology to provide real-time IT infrastructure backup and redundant functionality to minimize downtime during recovery from a disaster.

What is DRaaS?

DRaaS offers companies an outsourcing option to protect their IT infrastructure and associated applications from natural and digital catastrophes. A company’s ability and ability to serve its customers can be affected by disasters like a power outage or hardware failure. Apart from its human capital, the company’s IT infrastructure can be its most valuable asset. A recovery plan is crucial to avoid costly downtime and business interruption.

How does DRaaS work?

DRaaS uses a combination of cloud-based and hardware infrastructure to offer disaster recovery solutions that are more reliable than the traditional in-house disaster recovery processes. DRaaS uses the flexibility of the cloud to replicate a company’s critical IT infrastructure completely. This includes the server and service environments that are necessary to continue running.

Recovery time objections (RTO), and recovery point goals (RPO) are the underlying goals of DRaaS. RTO refers to the maximum time an application could be unavailable during an outage. It is usually measured in minutes. RPO, which is usually measured in seconds, is when data loss could occur during a disaster. RTO and RPO both have costs. For example, backing up data every 30 seconds is more costly than every 30 minutes.

The Value of DRaaS

DRaaS can be an excellent option for companies with their IT infrastructure fully replicated in a second data center. This could significantly lower costs and reduce downtime. DRaaS can be cheaper and more effective than in-house disaster recovery. The first is that DRaaS providers don’t have to provide active/active services for their end-users. In other words, if your disaster event is not happening, you won’t be utilizing any of the DRaaS provider’s computing resources.

The second reason is that DRaaS service providers use high-performance software that allows customers to share computing resources. This means that even if you’re not using your DRaaS computing resources, another customer can use them. The elastic computing infrastructure combined with virtualized servers dramatically reduces the DRaaS provider’s infrastructure requirements and drastically reduces costs for the customer.

A DRaaS can be more than a backup service provider. DRaaS supports all infrastructure configurations and functionality necessary to replace your live service in case of failure. Given the high cost of downtime and the inability of businesses to sustain network failures of any type, IT managers are under immense pressure to ensure 100% uptime.

DRaaS can help reduce the complexity of disaster recovery. This is something that many businesses wish to avoid. If you don’t regularly monitor and test your disaster recovery procedures, it’s likely things won’t go as smoothly as they should. Depending on your preference, you can have this responsibility partially or completely offloaded to a DRaaS provider.

Risks and Challenges with DRaaS

Outsourcing your company data and disaster recovery processes to a third party is the most significant benefit and greatest risk of DRaaS. You can rely on the DRaaS provider for disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Your business’s needs can be met at a moment’s notice by the DRaaS service.

It is difficult to determine the scalability and capacity of DRaaS solutions. DRaaS’s flexibility and agility allow providers to reduce costs by only utilizing resources for clients active in disaster recovery mode. This assumes that clients won’t require their service at all. It can be hard to tell if a DRaaS provider can handle multiple customers simultaneously.

Another important consideration is security. You rely upon a third-party provider to back up your data and replicate your service. They must have robust security policies. When choosing your DRaaS provider, compliance forms such as HIPAA and PCI should be taken into consideration. Ask potential service providers for the Service Organization Control 2 report. This report will provide details about their non-financial controls such as security and privacy, confidentiality, availability, processing integrity, and confidentiality. This information is essential for understanding how your provider handles your data and where it is being used. Failure to use a compliant DRaaS system could lead to bad publicity, fines, and criminal prosecution.

Your network connectivity is the last and most important. Your network traffic load will be increased by data replication and backups. You must ensure your company has sufficient bandwidth to handle the increased traffic from a DRaaS provider before you decide.

Implementing DRaaS

DRaaS providers typically offer tiered pricing plans that allow you to choose from different service levels depending on your requirements. Recovery times are often a key feature of different tiers. It is crucial to understand the criticality of your IT assets and map them to the appropriate payment plan. These recovery times can vary from less than an hour to several hours to 24 to 48 hours, depending on which payment plan you choose. This is important so that you don’t get caught in the unfortunate event.

Any modern IT strategy should include a high-performing disaster recovery system. DRaaS provides peace of mind for customers, employees, and the organization.