What is DRaaS?

DRaaS, also known as disaster recovery as a service, is the replication of hosting of physical or virtual servers by a third party to provide failover in the event of a man made or natural catastrophe. DRaaS can be especially useful to organizations that lack the necessary expertise to provision, configure, and test an effective disaster recovery plan (DRP).

Why is DRaaS useful?

Millions of businesses around the world encounter some form of natural disaster. Imagine if a power outage, hardware failure, file corruption, human error, earthquake, flood, hurricane, thunderstorm, wildfire, winter weather, or tornado, strikes your data center. Major interruptions like your website going down or losing all your customer data will likely occur.

In Ponemon Institute’s “Cost of Data Center Outages” study, it was reported that unplanned downtime costs organizations an average cost of $8,850 per minute.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) reported that 43% of organizations affected by a natural disaster never reopen, and 29% of organizations affected close within two years of the occurrence.

DRaaS focuses on a short recovery point objective. This means that the data restored will be as close to its current “now” state as possible. Typical recovery time objectives are within 4 hours and will bring up machines geographically located in a different location. For example, if your datacenter in Florida gets affected by a hurricane, DRaaS ensures your data will not be lost by switching to live mirrored servers in Nevada, which was not affected by the hurricane.

What should you consider when choosing a DRaaS?

1. Get a performance service level agreement (SLA) - Create a contract between you and your service provider to ensure pre-defined performance (i.e. 1 hour SLA guaranteeing your critical applications will be up and running within an hour).

2. DRaaS costs are highly variable - Watch out for hidden fees (i.e. retrieval fees that charge per gigabyte which can substantially add up).

3. Couple DRaaS with data protection - The cloud is an ideal place for long-term data retention because it’s isolated from production data and remote from ransomware.

4. Pay for only what you use - Choose a provider that offers different DRaaS services for different classes of applications.

5. Cloud seeding options - With cloud seeding, you can use physical media (i.e. tape, server, hard disks, etc.) to pre-load your data to the cloud and restore a failed local database.

6. DRaaS can protect cloud applications - Deploy a backup appliance within the cloud and point your cloud applications to backup software in a different cloud facility than where your cloud applications are running.

7. Include automated test recovery - You should have automated testing at least once a month and after any changes to the infrastructure to ensure your applications will really recovery.

8. Advantages of purpose-built clouds - Purpose-built clouds have seamless integration between your backup appliances and the cloud, holistic support, and predictable recovery times.