Downtime caused by data loss not only hurts a business’ bottom-line but can also lead to lost productivity, revenue, customers and reputation. Downtime caused by lost or compromised IT systems can be even more devastating. Today businesses are mitigating these financial risks by taking precautions like implementing Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).
What is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)?
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is often confused with traditional backup, which is simply a copy of a business’s data. Disaster recovery refers to complete replication of an IT environment to allow continuation of business in the case of a disaster leading to complete failure (physical or cyber-based) of the environment. The main difference between traditional DR and DRaaS is that the recovery site is in the cloud for DRaaS.
DRaaS is often offered paired with a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) or a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) which lays out the steps to recovery in the case of an emergency, getting the business back on their feet as quickly as possible.
What are the advantages of DRaaS?
1. Reduces the complexity related to disaster recovery planning
Before cloud technology, traditional disaster recovery plans were complex, costly, and time-consuming to deploy and manage. However, DRaaS requires the purchase of little to no hardware, and there is no need for businesses to build and manage secondary data centres.
2. Reduced disaster recovery planning costs
Organisations that build their own infrastructure find out that it’s a costly venture that consumes a large amount of their time and resources. Many businesses may not even have access to such resources and therefore, find investing in a DRaaS provider is an excellent solution. In addition, DRaaS shifts the spend from CapEx to OpEx making it very desirable (and more affordable) for many modern businesses
3. Easy to scale
The ability to easily scale the solution is one of the key advantages of DRaaS, since it’s cloud-based there aren’t the normal hardware limitations. The solution can easily be configured to accommodate a business’ changing requirements upon demand; allowing them to basically pay for what they need when they need it.
4. Save time
DRaaS means organisations don’t have to worry about the effort of running their own disaster recovery, it’s all done for them by their service provider. They don’t have to worry about establishing routine tests, setting custom recovery objectives, establishing virtual machine failovers and all the other tasks required on an ongoing basis.
5. Consolidation of IT infrastructure
By consolidating their DRaaS solution, businesses can turn their data centres, disaster recovery plans, and hybrid cloud into a secure and streamlined IT environment.
The Bottom Line
DRaaS is an intelligent solution for businesses looking to save the huge, infrastructure and management costs of a bespoke solution by putting their disaster recovery in the cloud. It also allows organisations a sense of relief when they face the unexpected and reduce their downtime. Due to its importance, all businesses looking to outsource Disaster Recovery as a Service must do their due diligence and ensure that the selected provider is compliant with all the controls their business needs.
As with any outsourced project, especially related to IT, an organisation has to place a certain amount of trust in their provider of choice. A potential DRaaS provider must be able and ready to implement the solution and meet the indicated recovery point and time objectives without incident.
To learn about how The Missing Link can help protect your business with our DRaaS solution, get in touch with us today.
