Until the advent of the cloud, protecting crucial business applications and workloads traditionally required building and maintaining a second on-prem data center which was a costly commitment and a massive operational exercise. Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solutions can now extend data centers into the cloud at a fraction of the costs. The latest DRaaS report from “Transparency Market Research,” highlights the fact that organizations are increasingly leveraging the cloud for disaster recovery (DR). It further estimates that DRaaS is expected to grow at an annual rate of 35.7% through 2024. Gartner furthermore envisages that 90% of disaster recovery operations will run in the cloud by 2020.
What is DRaaS?
DRaaS entails replicating and hosting physical or virtual servers in the cloud to ensure failover can be provided in the event of a disaster or disruption. These could include a simple power failure, severe weather, natural disasters such as floods and fires, cyberattacks or human error. This means that since the service provider’s infrastructure is off-prem, the aforementioned incidents are less likely to impact on operations. The result? The organization’s disaster recovery plan can be actioned immediately and so minimize costly downtime and avoid data loss.
What are the advantages of moving disaster recovery to the cloud?
- It’s cost-efficient with low upfront costs
Purchasing equipment and building on-prem data centers are eliminated when moving disaster recovery to the cloud. Organizations can harness significant savings on hardware, software, facilities, staff, utilities and other traditional expenses associated with on-prem data centers.
- There are flexible payment options available
The majority of computing programs and apps use a subscription-based approach. This gives organizations the freedom and flexibility to either scale up or down in line with their needs and budgets. It also obviates the need for a substantial upfront capital expense.
- Easily change CapEX to OpEX
Employing a cloud solution enables you to move high-capital expenses to operational expenses. This means you no longer have the hassle of managing and updating cumbersome hardware and your IT team can realign their focus to driving revenue.
- It facilitates fast, secure, and consistent recovery
Cloud-based disaster recovery means you can attain your RPO and RTO goals effectively. Files can easily be restored and whole workloads can even be recovered from your cloud backup.
- Data encryption
As incidents of cybercrime are higher than ever, data security should always be at the forefront of any business continuity and disaster recovery planning. Cloud-based disaster recovery means your data is encrypted both in transit and when dormant.
Final thoughts on DRaaS
The right DRaaS solution should be able to protect your data and your applications. Furthermore, it should be able to recover your environment according to your RPOs, RTOs, within budget while still adhering to compliance requirements. The solution that you implement should therefore include a fully tested and managed disaster recovery plan, 24×7 failover and instant recovery. You should furthermore be able to access your disaster recovery solution from any location.
Choosing a DRaaS solution requires a third-party technology partner who can methodically meet your organization’s DRaaS objectives. Stage2Data uses your company’s existing infrastructure to recreate your server in the cloud. If a disaster occurs, simply call Stage2Data to arrange a recreation of the system. Your data will remain intact whilst our DR experts work with you to resolve the problem.
