Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is a cloud-based DR method that has gained popularity in recent year due to the rise of virtualization, which has revolutionized the way companies operate today.

 

By decoupling data from the underlying physical hardware, businesses are freed from the limitations imposed by a need to keep their data within arm’s reach — it can now be stored anywhere in the world that it makes operational and regulatory sense to do so. However, while data is more mobile than ever, many organizations do not have a comprehensive plan in place for how to recover their data in case of natural disaster, human error, ransomware, etc.

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Positives of DRaaS include lower cost, easier deployment and the ability to test plans regularly. Cloud storage services save an organization money by running on a shared infrastructure. They are more flexible, as organizations can sign up for just the services they need. DR tests can be completed by simply spinning up temporary instances.

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Don’t be fooled though, simple backup is not the same as disaster recovery. Many backup vendors claim to provide DR as part of their solution, but unless they are optimized to provide the fast recovery of all enterprise data and applications, they aren’t enough. If you need quick access to mission-critical data, such as following a ransomware attack, it could be weeks before you get it. 

 

A well-designed backup/restore solution should include DR data stores in one or more separate locations. Most importantly, the enterprise should be able to restore operations quickly and easily, including spinning up VMs off-premises or in the cloud to run applications in order to maintain business continuity.

 

With a comprehensive DR strategy in place, companies can achieve a recovery point objective (RPO) of less than 24 hours and a recovery time objective (RTO) of mere minutes, restoring any amount of data — from an individual file to a complete virtual machine. 

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