AdminWhether due to natural disasters, human error or cyber-attacks, your business can’t afford to lose access to its critical systems for too long. With a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, your organization can minimize downtime and ensure the continued flow of revenue by restoring access to your systems and applications.
Disaster recovery, or DR, is a subset of business continuity that specifically focuses on the IT infrastructure that supports your mission-critical activities. Traditionally, disaster recovery has involved implementing a secondary site in the form of a physical or virtual backup datacenter that is managed by an internal team. While this can be effective, it requires significant upfront investment and ongoing management to create a fully operational disaster recovery site. DRaaS offers an alternative solution, making DR more accessible and affordable for smaller organizations with lean IT teams.
With a DRaaS solution, your business’s primary infrastructure is replicated and hosted by your DRaaS provider. When a failure occurs at your primary site, your systems fail over to the remote DRaaS environment where you’ll be able to continue operating. Many DRaaS providers also offer monitoring and support services, helping you restore systems and resume operations. This is known as managed DRaaS, and it’s often the best choice for smaller organizations with limited resources and skills.
The underlying technology for DRaaS is typically found in your backup computer software, and the process is very similar to backup-as-a-service (BaaS). However, there are some differences. While BaaS focuses on protecting your least-critical data, DRaaS protects your most important datasets and enables you to recover your systems faster after a disaster event.
A full DRaaS implementation involves both BaaS and DRaaS. It’s important to understand the difference between these two models so you can determine which one is right for your business.
In a supported DRaaS solution, your DRaaS vendor is responsible for managing and supporting all aspects of your disaster recovery planning, testing and execution. This includes the creation and management of your secondary infrastructure, the monitoring of all DR operations, and the restoration of your production systems after a failure. Supported DRaaS is typically the cheapest option, and it’s ideal for smaller businesses without the resources to create their own DR site. However, if your company has customized software or other applications that can’t easily be replaced in a DR environment, then self-service DRaaS is probably the better option for you. disaster recovery cloud services