DRaaS And The Cloud: The Why, What, And How Of Recovery Services

The network cloud has become a very popular place. All kinds of services can be found there. Now, add disaster recovery to the list. It turns out that cloud service features match customer requirements for backup and recovery solutions amazingly well. Stringent security and high availability in carrier-class cloud environments have been proven and accepted. So if you've been waiting on these features to look into cloud services for disaster recovery, the wait is over.

Cloud Service Benefits

Yes, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) - a subset of Recovery as a Service (RaaS) - is booming because customers are feeling confident in the security and availability features in cloud infrastructures. But that's just the beginning. DRaaS is also very popular because, as many individuals and companies that use cloud service providers have discovered, it's much easier to leverage a professional data center environment that is built and maintained by someone else. You don't have to buy and maintain your own infrastructure, and you can tailor your service package to exactly what you need, when you need it. No need to over-buy. Pay-as-you-grow pricing can dramatically lower the costs of doing it yourself.

Disaster Recovery Options

1. DIY:
Do-it-yourself disaster recovery is of course an option. An expensive one. High capital and operational costs for equipment and expertise in at least two data centers to provide failover are required.

2. Outsource:
You can outsource disaster recovery to a managed service provider's multi-tenant data center environment. Sure, that's more affordable but a shared environment often doesn’t necessarily comply with regulations for mission-critical data and applications. Manually backing up the data and applications yourself makes it even more affordable. But, that's a lot of work.

3. Disaster Recovery As A Service (DRaaS):
DRaaS features an outsourced solution in a private cloud environment with dedicated infrastructure for each customer. No shared resources, so that's more secure and compliant with industry regulations. All of the great cloud benefits apply, and you can tailor your DRaaS package based on two key metrics: RTO and RPO. Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the speed of the recovery of the network. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the precise point in an application's processing where a recovery occurs.

An RTO of 15 minutes and an RPO that is near zero are more expensive than if these metrics are measured in hours and minutes respectively. You can designate a mix of shorter and longer RTO and RPO times, for mission critical and other applications and data, to lower costs and get the recovery solution best suited to your organization.

Interested in finding out more about DRaaS? Check out the online toolkit, featuring executive brief, "Recovery as a Service Comes of Age" co-authored by Presidio, Sungard AS, and Cisco.