Disaster Recovery as a Service: What it is?

Disaster Recovery as a Service: What it is?

Cloud computing has allowed IT teams to improve their operations in a variety of ways, so it’s no surprise that cloud services have now extended to disaster recovery. With disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) offerings, organizations get an efficient, effective and affordable way to meet their disaster recovery needs, in addition to other important benefits. In this post, we’ll provide a quick look at what DRaaS is, and some of the benefits you can hope to enjoy by using it.

What is DRaaS?

To put it simply, a DRaaS offering involves a third-party cloud service provider that performs replication and hosting of an organization’s servers. In the event of a disaster, the service provider will offer failover services that help the organization in question return to pre-disaster levels of operation as quickly as possible.

A DRaaS offering can serve as the basis for a disaster recovery plan, just like a traditional offsite disaster recovery environment would. The most important difference is that the organization doesn’t have to pay to build and maintain their own off-site DR environment.

What are the benefits of DRaaS?

1. Cost savings

Cutting down on expensive infrastructure investments is an important benefit of any cloud-based offering, but it’s especially helpful in the case of disaster recovery. For one thing, disaster recovery capabilities are not a “nice to have”; organizations need to invest in DR to ensure the ongoing uptime of their organization, so they might as well do it in the most budget-friendly manner possible.

Traditional DR capabilities depend on dedicated offsite backup and replication facilities, built and maintained solely by the organization itself. Implementing such facilities can be a budget-buster even for very large organizations, while smaller businesses may not be able to afford them at all. DRaaS puts high-quality disaster recovery into reach for all organizations, by removing the need to make significant up-front capital investments in backup and replication facilities. Instead, the cost of using the managed facilities is spread out over time as affordable regular payments.

2. Flexibility to change over time

For organizations that are expecting future growth, and the change in DR requirements that often accompanies it, traditional disaster recovery simply doesn’t offer adequate levels of flexibility. The need to build and maintain a separate backup and replication facility essentially locks an organization into using a particular DR environment for the time being.

With DRaaS, cloud providers are able to add or remove resources from a particular disaster recovery environment as the needs of a business change. As a result, an organization has the flexibility needed to ensure ongoing uptime even in the aftermath of growth, without having to schedule an expensive and inconvenient upgrade in order to do so.

3. Abilities that extend beyond disaster recovery

The name "disaster recovery as a service" unintentionally sells short what you can hope to accomplish with such an offering. In reality, a DRaaS offering can help you with much more than just disaster recovery. DRaaS is able to support workloads across multiple platforms, making it the perfect choice for building out hybrid cloud environments, migrating data for OS upgrades, and supporting merger and acquisition activity. In reality, the ways you can use a DRaaS offering to help you run a better data center are only limited by your own imagination.

To learn more about DRaaS and how you can oversee a successful implementation, read the next post in our DRaaS series soon. Alternatively, you can contact the cloud experts at Cima Solutions Group to start planning your DRaaS solution at any time.

Ken Scott Ken Scott is the Director of Storage Sales at Cima Solutions Group. He has more than 31 years in technology sales, starting as a Client Representative with IBM in 1984. During his tenure with IBM, he supported clients of all sizes - from small business ventures to multi-national Fortune 100 enterprises. He spent his last 9 years with IBM as a Certified Storage Sales Specialist, recognized nationally for his expertise, and his ability to translate technical topics to business value. Ken joined Cima Solutions Group in 2007, and is responsible for building Cima’s storage portfolio, storage messaging, and storage solution design. He created RightStor, a process to help clients navigate the storage decision process and assign a validated Total Cost of Ownership and Return on Investment. Ken received a Bachelor of Business Administration Degree in Management Science and Computers from Southern Methodist University.


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