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What Is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)?

What is DRaaS?

Disaster Recovery as a Service, or DRaaS, helps safeguard your company from IT outages and helps build a resilient IT system to maintain servers and network usage throughout recovery processes.

Approximately 50% of IT outages are software or network failures, meaning it is highly likely that all businesses will experience a system failure at some point in their lifetime. Taking steps to manage this risk is crucial to mitigate the damage and financial costs that can result from such a disruption.

Disaster Recovery as a Service

DRaaS is a comprehensive third-party service that uses cloud and on-premise resources to back up vital data and applications, as well as providing system failover to a secondary infrastructure. DRaaS replicates your production infrastructure and all its processes onto a secondary, or recovery, infrastructure so that you can transition to a backup environment seamlessly, allowing your business services to continue as usual.

This secondary infrastructure can be implemented in the event of an IT disruption, providing you with a backup working environment whilst your original environment is repaired and your Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is put into action. DRaaS also assists the failback when you are ready to move services back to your original server, immediately resuming replication services to protect against future outages.

The level of support required by each business can vary, with some companies choosing to protect their entire environment and others selecting just the most vital functions. The services are laid out in a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that forms a contract between the customer and supplier allowing for flexibility and scalability to suit the needs of any business.

Advantages of using a DRaaS provider

Using a DRaaS provider can save your business a lot of time, money, and resources when it comes to disaster recovery. Using an expert third party supplier to manage failover not only speeds up recovery time and frees up your IT department to manage the system repair, but also reduces the risk of human error from in-house staff who are working under pressure in a disaster scenario.

Having a dedicated disaster recovery system can optimise your recovery strategy and ensure that it is always ready to go, with regular tests and updates guaranteed rather than sitting on the to-do list of an already-swamped IT department. The cloud based or hosted nature of DRaaS reduces the need for businesses to invest in their own off-site DR environment and allows for predictable monthly costs that can be scaled to suit the needs of any business.

Choosing the right provider for your business

It can be hard to know which DRaaS provider will offer the right services for your business so take time to research the various SLAs available. Consider your Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs). How much downtime can you afford and how quickly do you need to failover? Does quoted recovery time include full configuration and testing or just a system reboot? How often does your data need to be captured to ensure a comprehensive backup can be implemented? Once you have established what these are, ensure they are built into the SLA contractually.

Find out the process for implementing failover and failback - will they test your applications in advance to ensure they run smoothly or simply copy the data and hope for the best? Find out where the DRaaS provider stores their data and how it is protected. Choosing a DRaaS provider with a wealth of experience and expertise will give peace of mind that your IT systems are resilient against disruption and working with them to select the most suitable SLA means that the service you are receiving is right for you.

See how our DraaS solution can help you