Disaster recovery as a service is a solution that enables businesses to backup data and applications offsite to ensure business continuity in the event of local technology failure. It is offered by third-party vendors through a variety of deployment models. It can be delivered by a technology vendor, an IT managed service provider (MSP), or a combination of both.
Traditional disaster recovery requires expensive and labor-intensive efforts to manage and synchronize data backups in order to meet RTOs and RPOs. These efforts can be time-consuming and difficult to execute, particularly for organizations with limited resources. Additionally, testing can be challenging to schedule and can require expertise beyond the technical skills of an organization’s internal IT staff.
To combat these challenges, many companies are turning to DR as a service. DRaaS solutions replicate and host a virtual environment in the cloud, providing failover capabilities in the event of a disaster. They can provide a cost-effective way to implement an effective business continuity strategy, particularly for organizations that cannot afford or do not want to invest in setting up and maintaining a secondary site.
While a disaster recovery as a service is not a replacement for a comprehensive business continuity plan, it can help to minimize downtime and ensure the continued productivity of a business during a disruption. This can protect a company’s reputation and allow it to recover revenue from customers who may otherwise go elsewhere for services, or even shut down completely.
DRaaS offers three primary deployment models that determine the level of customer control and the amount of upfront investment. Full-service DRaaS, which is the most costly, is designed to remove all responsibility for planning and implementation of an organization’s disaster recovery plans from the customer. This model is typically only recommended for large, highly complex IT environments. Supported DRaaS is the most affordable option, and it provides the customer with some degree of responsibility for planning, testing and managing their disaster recovery plans. The vendor will be responsible for providing backup management software and hosts the customer’s backups and/or virtual machines in remote locations.
True DRaaS, which is the newest and most advanced of the three models, allows for immediate recovery from a disaster by replicating a complete virtual infrastructure on the server side. It can be deployed in either a public or private cloud.
A Disaster Recovery as a Service solution should be designed to fit an organization’s unique IT environment and business continuity requirements. It should include WAN-optimized replication, zero impact on production workloads and the ability to scale as business demands increase.
Flexential’s DRaaS solution, Recovery Cloud, offers a comprehensive IT resiliency platform to meet the requirements of any organization. Our team of experts will work with you to design and deploy a cloud-based disaster recovery solution that meets your RTOs, RPOs, business continuity requirements and overall IT resiliency goals. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you improve IT resiliency and disaster recovery readiness.