What is DRaaS? How Does it Work?

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What is DRaas? DRaaS suggests Disaster Recovery as a Service that organizations use for managing workloads. DRaaS is a cloud computing and backup service that can easily help organizations manage their project and data resources in their network. If any disaster occurs, be it physical or digital, this disaster recovery service will help the enterprise renew or resume its previous work-related operations.

If there is any system failure during a business continuity, then you can easily get past it using a proper DRaaS plan. DRaaS is often a part of the disaster recovery plan or DRP and business continuity plan (BCP). Disaster Recovery as a Service is also known as BCaaS or Business Continuity as a Service. In this post, we are going to tell you everything relevant to DRaaS. So, let’s continue reading.

What is Disaster Recovery as a Service?

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) works as a cloud computing service tool that enterprises trust to protect their data and digital infrastructure by backing it up to a third-party cloud environment. And this backup later provides data recovery operations via a SaaS solution so that the enterprise can regain control of its workload when a disaster takes place.

There is a service model in disaster recovery that allows organizations the freedom to back up their data during hard times. If the service model is applied to the disaster recovery plan, then that means the management team of the organization does not have to handle all the resources for disaster recovery. But organizations depend on the service provider itself for business continuity after an unfortunate event.

Disaster recovery plans are important for business modifications after a disaster. Many natural and artificial disasters can cause heavy destruction to the IT infrastructure. Natural disasters may include hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, wildfires, etc. While artificial disasters are man-made. From cyberattacks, and power outages to equipment failure all of these come under the artificial disaster category.

A decent DRaaS provides a proper infrastructure in the fail-safe mode on virtual servers. This includes computing, networking, as well as storage functions. In the DRaaS method, an enterprise can continue to run the applications on the cloud platform or hybrid cloud platform versus an affected physical server of the organization. This prompts a faster and more spontaneous recovery time no matter how havoc the disaster was. This recovery plan will go on for a while and once the disaster recovery team successfully replaces the physical server, they will move that data back to the physical server.

However, when the applications of the organization are running on the cloud, their latency can be high as well. Customers can notice the difference since they are used to running the apps from physical servers. And for that, the business expenses will rise and that’s why a company cannot continuously run the DRaaS plan because it is important to get back to a stable state after a disaster. There are many reasons why DRaaS is a useful tool for every organization.

How is DRaaS Useful?

Natural disasters or man-made disasters are happening everywhere and affecting millions of businesses in their own ways. Human error, earthquake, power outage, file corruption, flood, hurricane, thunderstorm, winter, tornado, etc. can easily disrupt your company’s data center. It can cause your website to collapse for a while, or you can also lose all your customers’ databases in a jiffy.

According to the Ponemon Institute, a downtime cost can be $8,850 on average per minute, and those expenses are huge for any organization. But the worst thing about natural disasters is that sometimes organizations cannot recover from them and they wind up their business. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 43% of the enterprises that were affected by a natural disaster, couldn’t get their operations back on track. And 29% of the organizations who have been through an event, got closed in a few years from the situation.

But with the help of DRaaS tools, you can easily back up a whole lot of data to a cloud environment. This means the data will be as it is right now in the physical server and will provide the same value after a situation. The most common recovery time of DRaaS data recovery is 4 hours and within that, the service will bring back the virtual machines in the same location digitally. For example, if your organization is affected by a hurricane in Washington DC and the data center is damaged, DRaaS will take care of that data by switching the mirrored server to another city that was not a part of the hurricane. But when you are choosing a DRaaS solution, there are some points you need to know about.

Things to Acknowledge While Choosing a DRaaS Tool

Here are the essential things you should consider when you are choosing DRaaS solutions for your business:

  • You need to get a performance Service Level Agreement (SLA) and create a contract with the service provider. This will help you ensure the performance of your DRaaS tool. This means you can set the hours which will define how your critical applications will run on the server.
  • Always keep an eye on the hidden fees of DRaaS and verify if the cost is suitable for your business. Hidden fees can include retrieval fees that can charge according to gigabytes and increase quickly per second.
  • The DRaaS solution should also include the Couple DRaaS with data protection that will isolate the production data and remote data from ransomware. Since the cloud can be the best place for data storage, it gives a long-term arrangement for organizational data.
  • Don’t pay extra. Some providers offer multiple and various DRaaS services for different types of cloud applications.
  • You should also look for cloud seeding options in DRaaS solutions that will help you with physical media such as hard disks, servers, tapes, etc., and will help you preload your data to the cloud and restore a database after a failure.
  • You can deploy a backup instrument within the cloud database and allow your cloud applications to back up the software in another cloud environment where the cloud applications are running.
  • You should also do at least once a month automated test recovery after there is a change to the IT infrastructure to ensure that your applications are ready for recovery.
  • DRaaS solutions should provide you with seamless integration between the cloud, backup appliances, expected recovery times, etc.

There is an easy and seamless way DRaaS works for organizational operations which may be complex but worth it.

How Does DRaaS Work?

A DRaaS provider will offer a company an infrastructure that will work like the customers’ DR site when a disaster occurs. A software or a hardware appliance will be included in the DRaaS tool that will help you with the data recovery mechanism. This software application or hardware equipment will move replication to a private or public cloud network. In some DRaaS, the provider manages all the failures, and transitions the data to the users from the IT infrastructure to the hosted service. The provider also does all the jobs for managing tasks, resuming operations, etc. However, the companies might also need to manage other services of DRaaS tools such as the equipment tools cost.

There are some advantages and disadvantages of the DRaaS tools that you might also need to know.

What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of DRaaS?

Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages of DRaaS that you should know:

1. Advantages

  • No not need to establish a secondary data center as a data recovery plan.
  • Does not require a storage duplication of the primary data center and the data recovery site.
  • Offers data recovery services for small and medium-sized businesses that do not have the necessary expertise to create an effective DR.
  • Allows the in-house staff to focus on applications, machines, and other organizational equipment instead of data recovery.

2. Disadvantages

  • The DRaaS provider must be trustworthy since you are trusting them with your data recovery plan after an event occurs.
  • The customer or your business needs to rely on the DRaaS security when everything falls over.
  • Applications can encounter performance errors when running on the cloud infrastructure.
  • Continuous data replication and bandwidth challenges may occur.

Conclusion

Many DRaaS providers in the market focus on the data protection of various organizations. They also focus on the storage quality of storing the data, that serves large IT sectors and cloud servers. Acronis, AWS, Axcient, Bios Middle East, C&W Business, Carbonite, Databarracks, Flexential, Expedient, Infrascale, Sungard Availability Services (AS), TierPoint, Microsoft, Net3 Technology, IBM, iland, InterVision, Quorum, RapidScale, Recovery Point, Unitrends, VMware, and Zerto are some of the most famous and reliable DRaaS providers. Now you will have to understand which of these providers are perfect for your business and which data recovery service will be right for you. Mostly, the providers copy your data and keep two backups and then format that back up to make it suitable for a network drive or external hard drive, etc. One of these backups is also stored in the cloud storage.

Before you go for a paid DRaaS service, make sure they meet your requirements and can safely protect your data, systems, applications, etc. no matter what.

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