The Top Advantages of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS): Part I

This blog series will dive into the many advantages of Disaster Recovery as a Service and how the underlying technologies can help your business recover more quickly following a disaster. When disaster strikes, many organizations are faced with the reality of having to re-evaluate their DR solution and make modifications to keep up with the pace of today’s business. Most organizations struggle to champion a solution that’s appropriately configured, continually monitored, and regularly tested, with enough geodiversity to survive a coastal event.

Handing the keys over to an organization to manage the most critical element in your business continuity plan isn’t an easy pill to swallow—that is, until you understand how the service is delivered. Working with an organization that specializes in the management and monitoring of your recovery platform ensures industry-standard best practices and best-of-breed hardware.

Backup as a Service vs Disaster Recovery as a Service

Information and Technology professionals have seen a shift from the once-standard “Backup as a Service” to the all-encompassing “Disaster Recovery as a Service.” Prior to this shift, an organization’s day-to-day backups required two separate platforms: one for version control, and a completely different one for disaster recovery. The technologies didn’t exist to wrap them into one tight package.

Enter the Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service model: Service providers were quick to adapt to the need and come up with a solution that would wrap the two into one service. Encapsulating the two enables us to accomplish multiple goals: reducing the total bandwidth required for offsite replication, reducing the time needed for maintenance windows, reducing overall recovery-point objectives, and reducing the overall recovery time objective. At a time when organizations must be hypersensitive to regulatory compliance, data security, data sensitivity, data integrity, and global security, outsourcing this piece to a service provider is becoming a valuable option.

Advantages of Disaster Recovery as a Service

This series will dive into the advantages of choosing a Disaster Recovery as a Service provider and what the underlying technologies enable your business to do moving forward, such as:

• Allowing the business to continue to operate on cloud resources while the physical infrastructure is repaired.
• Eliminating the need to provide your own physical geo-diverse datacenter to provide protection against a catastrophic event.
• Transforming the capital expenditure on resources and headcount to manage your disaster recovery plan into a scalable operational expense.
• Enabling rapid recovery from ransomware attacks since your data is stored in an offsite facility that’s not part of your local network.
• Providing rlexibility to scale with rapid growth or contract with the decommissioning of systems (or with changing RPO and RTO’s).
• Increasing reliability since your data is following industry-standard best practices and processes.
• Simplifying the testing of your DR Methodology.

Whether it’s the superior reliability or the lack of staff to manage a successful operation, DRaaS is a viable solution for any organization looking to take their business continuity plan to the next level. Over the next few weeks, we’ll continue to pull back the curtain on how these technologies work and why they are beneficial for your business, so stay tuned. But if you can’t wait that long to learn the answers, please feel free to reach out to us with any questions. We’d love to help you get started.

Check out the other parts of this series: Why DRaaS is critical to business objectives and 5 Vital Strategic Questions to Ask Your DRaaS Provider.