What is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)?

What is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)?

Today’s businesses can’t afford the enforced downtime, missed opportunities, and potential financial penalties of an IT disaster. That’s why most companies invest in Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) – a failsafe system that allows them to appropriately manage the impact of an IT catastrophe.

Traditional DR includes onsite equipment and backups that can replicate the essential parts of an IT infrastructure, including data and software. Cloud-based DR utilizes offsite servers to do the same thing, eliminating the need for an expensive and labor-intensive onsite DR setup.

From a business perspective, DRaaS allows a company to outsource much of their disaster response – including system monitoring, data backups, equipment maintenance, and switching from the primary system to the backup system – to a third-party provider.

An IT disaster is any event that significantly disrupts an organization’s data, software, operations, or tech infrastructure. Disasters include:
-Power outages (i.e. where no backup generator is available)
-Natural disasters ( hurricanes, tornados, floods, wildfires, etc.)
-Equipment failures
-Internet/connectivity disruptions
-Service/software failures
-Data loss/corruption
-User error
-Data breaches
-Cyberattacks/hacking
-Malware

What is an IT Disaster?

How Does DRaaS Prepare You for Disaster?

DRaaS saves time, money, and stress in the event of an IT disaster.

Not only are IT disasters expensive, but they also leave you scrambling to get back to an operational state. Employees and entire departments sit idle, while IT teams rush to provide access to data, programs, etc.

Of course, if we knew when disasters were going to strike, we’d take steps to minimize the damage. And that is what disaster recovery as a service does – it creates a copy of your company’s essential programs and other systems that can be instantly accessed. This is called workload replication.

The other side of DRaaS is backing up your data. This can be done immediately, after a brief delay, in batches, on site, in the Cloud – in many different ways. When you use a third-party Cloud service to back up your data, that’s called Backup as a Service (BaaS).

What’s the Difference Between DRaaS and BaaS?

DRaaS is a more comprehensive offering than BaaS; you could say that DRaaS includes BaaS. BaaS is largely concerned with the automated synchronization and storage of data. On its own, it’s best used as a way to archive data and store backup copies. DRaaS includes data synchronization, storage, and backup, but it adds in features like system monitoring, failover (instantly switching to the backup system), and workload replication.

Why is Disaster Recovery so Important?

These days, any data leakage or outage is a serious headache for businesses. Customers don’t care why your service isn’t working; they just want it to work. If it doesn’t, they’ll look for an alternative. Numerous data breaches have left millions of people agitated about the security of their personal information. In some cases, businesses can be held financially liable for data breaches.

And that’s only part of the equation. The other part is the monetary burden of fixing the problem. Research gathered by Atlassian states that the cost per minute of downtime ranges from $2,300 to $9,000, with the average being $5,600 per minute. For small businesses, this cost drops to hundreds of dollars per minute, but how many businesses can afford that? 

Add in the damage to a company’s reputation and the resulting loss of actual or potential customers, and there’s an inescapable conclusion: No matter how you count them, the costs of an IT disaster are too high. But then, so are the costs of an onsite DR system. This brings us back to DRaaS.

The Benefits of DRaaS

Disaster Recovery as a Service has several main advantages. A key benefit is that it makes DR available to businesses that may not have the budget or expertise to manage it on their own. Compared to traditional onsite DR, DRaaS:

• Saves time by automating system monitoring and data backup tasks. Plus, the DRaaS provider maintains their own offsite equipment, which cuts down on the onsite equipment maintenance required of the IT team.
• Saves money, as organizations only pay for what they use. They do not need to buy, house, and maintain backup equipment or systems.
• Removes the burden from IT personnel and business leaders. Backup and maintenance tasks are time-consuming; most IT teams are glad to turn them over to automated processes. And with a DR plan in place, business leaders can stop worrying about what to do if a disaster happens; there’s already a solution in place to keep the business running and the data secure.

Key Considerations for Choosing a DRaaS Provider

When choosing a DRaaS provider, look for a company that will meet your unique needs. This can include predefined service levels, guaranteed availability and monitoring, a mutually acceptable response time, and access to a team of DR specialists.

Each individual organization will need a plan that’s tailored for its data, applications, and infrastructure. That’s why at NETdepot, we create a custom solution to fit your needs. T talk with one of our security experts today, contact us at sales@netdepot.com or call us at 1-844-25-CLOUD.