Disaster Recovery As A Service (DRaaS)
Dallas & Fort Worth
Key Points From the Article:
- DRaaS is a service that replicates organizations' data, physical servers, and virtual machines to a third-party data center. When disaster strikes, your business can quickly recover with little downtime.
- Many reasons necessitate the need for DRaaS, but for the most part, it accelerator business resilience — protecting enterprises' technology from downtime.
- The service backups data on an offsite server to provide quick and reliable system recovery when a disaster strikes.
- There are different models of DRaaS that an enterprise can adopt depending on its needs.
DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) is the service of replicating organizations' data, physical servers, or virtual machines to a third-party data center. When a disaster, ransomware attack, or power outage interrupts business operations, DRaaS can quickly recover its infrastructure with little downtime.
Disaster Recovery as a Service allows enterprises to backup data, IT infrastructure, primary server, and applications to a third-party cloud in different locations. In case a disaster strikes your business' primary server, the backup on your DRaaS data center will quickly help you bounce back to operation.
Unlike the traditional disaster recovery methods that require your enterprise to operate an off-site disaster recovery facility, DRaaS transfers the burden of your IT service provider.
Why Enterprises Adopt DRaaS to Protect their Business
Many factors necessitate backup and recovery services located far from an enterprise's main data center — where large disasters cannot impact both locations. However, the most common reasons organizations adopt DRaaS include:
- The existence of high-profile disasters such as the California wildfires, Hurricane Sandy, and the Texas power grid outages — they can render on-site backup useless.
- The surge in sophisticated ransomware and DDoS attacks points to the necessity of disaster recovery and cybersecurity beyond covering natural disasters.
- Organizations need reliable disaster recovery to avoid the cost of downtime. According to the Uptime Institute survey, there is a surge in data center downtime, with one-sixth of the participants saying that recent outages cost them over $1 million. Even scarier, FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) says that 43% of enterprises that faces natural disaster never reopen. Of the remaining businesses, 29% go out of business within two years.
- The pandemic also drove the adoption of DRaaS. As organizations reduced the number of their IT staff, they had to redesign their disaster recovery plans. DRaaS presented the right answer to staffing problems while shifting disaster recovery to an OPEX expenditure.
- Businesses today deal with large data volume because of shifting their critical activities online. The typical 3-2-1 backup practice can't be adequate to ensure business continuity if a disaster strikes.
The 3-2-1 approach requires your enterprise to have three copies of data:
- Operating data
- An onsite copy
- Offsite copy
Your business makes the onsite copy daily or continuously, but you update the offsite copy weekly or monthly.
When enterprises were not heavily reliant on technology, the weekly or monthly updates were adequate. However, an enterprise today can't afford to lose a week or month-worth data loss.
Letting a DRaaS provider execute the continuous cloud back for your enterprise — on an off-site server — would ensure backup reliability while keeping costs down.
How DRaaS Works
DRaaS replicates your business data, physical server, applications, and virtual machine to a third-party data center in a separate location. If a disaster strikes your business, the service provider will quickly help you recover your system.
At its core DRaaS operate under two concepts:
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
RPO describes the amount of data an enterprise can lose when a disaster strikes. On the other hand, RTO describes the time between the disaster striking and the recovery process to restore your business to normal.
DRaaS provider designs their services to restore your business data as close as possible to its previous state before the disaster strike. You'll therefore have the shortest RPO.
Unlike the on-premise backups, which can restore your system and data without downtime, cloud-based DRaaS has recovery time objectives of a few hours.
The Processes in DRaaS
DRaaS services begin with system replication. When you protect your system with DRaaS, the service provider executes backup at time intervals that the RPO states. The provider will direct your backup data away from your primary data center to their data center.
The replicated data will serve up the latest instances of your system.
If a disaster strikes your business, the provider will initiate the recovery process. People using your system will be re-directed away from your primary data center to the DRaaS provider's data center, where your business has the latest backup.
Many DRaaS providers offer automatic data restoration — your system runs on their server while restoring your primary server. As a result, you'll experience minimum disruptions as possible.
After the provider has fully restored your primary data center, your user will be directed back to your primary server.
DRaaS Options A Business Can Choose
DRaaS comes in three basic models:
- Managed DRaaS
- Assisted DRaaS
- DIY DRaaS
Managed DRaaS
When you go for managed DRaaS, you outsource all your disaster recovery process to a service provider. The DRaaS provider will shoulder the burden of protecting your system, which includes:
- On-premises servers
- Cloud solutions
- IT infrastructure
- Hybrid system
A managed DRaaS provider will execute disaster recovery testing, validation, operations, and maintenance. When a disaster strike, they may provide staff to manage the recovery process.
Assisted DRaaS
Assisted DRaaS allows your business to retain more control over the disaster recovery process. Your organization can choose to handle integration, testing, and more and outsource other parts of the disaster recovery procedures.
Assisted DRaaS is an excellent model to adopt when your enterprise has a highly specialized system or application, but you need extra help.
DIY DRaaS
The DIY model is excellent when you have a large team of IT staff.
The model allows you to replicate your system off-site and host your backup offline. However, your enterprise will be responsible for integration, validation, testing, and restoration if a disaster strikes your business.
DataEcon Will Help Your Enterprise Cut Down Disaster Risks
Ensuring business continuity is an excellent risk management practice your organization can take. Your corporation needs to carefully consider essential data and systems that sustain profitability in your business and protect them from downtime even when disaster strikes.
Contact an expert at DataEcon to help you protect valuable data and infrastructure.
