The cloud has revolutionised many different aspects of business IT, from cloud storage to remote desktops. Now, disaster recovery is also available in the cloud. Known as Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), this newer form of disaster recovery is quickly becoming the go-to method to ensure business continuity after a disaster.
How Is DRaaS different to standard disaster recovery?
In a DRaaS environment, all of an enterprise’s critical systems and data are duplicated to a public or private cloud infrastructure using DRaaS. If the business’s premises is affected by a disaster, their critical systems will fail over to the cloud-based recovery service, and the business will be able to continue their operations in the cloud. The execution of this process is the responsibility of the DRaaS provider, which is usually a managed IT services provider.
What Are The Benefits of DRaaS?
Affordability –
Standard disaster recovery is time-consuming and requires a great deal of expertise and experience to get right. This used to mean that only the largest businesses had the resources to put together a comprehensive disaster recovery plan. Smaller businesses were left to hope that they would be lucky enough to survive a disaster without a plan.
This was regrettable as small to medium sized businesses are often the most at risk from disasters. A large multinational company is very unlikely to go out of business, even after a sustained period of downtime – but small businesses can quickly lose out to competitors if they suffer a serious outage or an event like a data breach which reduces public confidence in their brand.
Because DRaaS utilises cloud computing services, is administered by a third-party, and paid for over time at a flat monthly rate, it brings disaster recovery into a price range that is far more affordable for small and medium sized businesses.
Scalable –
Because DRaaS is paid for on an ongoing basis, it can also be scaled with your business as it grows. As data backups are performed using cloud services, there is no need to take up physical space in an office with a server, and you don’t need to future-proof your disaster recovery by over-purchasing ahead of time, you can simply increase your monthly DRaaS cost incrementally as your business grows.
Expert Team –
When working with a managed IT services provider who supplies Disaster Recovery as a Service, you get the benefit of working with an entire team of experts who are on call 24/7 to respond to your business in the event of disaster.
Effective disaster recovery services anticipate and mitigate the interruption to your business and help you recover from it in a way that also improves your resilience going forward.
We hope this has been a useful overview of Disaster Recovery as a Service and its benefits. If you run a business, you need to consider how to protect it if the worst-case scenario should happen, consider speaking to an IT services provider near you.