Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) 

What is Disaster Recovery?

What happens to your business in the event of a cyberattack, a natural disaster, or an act of terrorism? How do you resume critical functions and ensure business continuity at such times? This is where a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan comes into play. If there is anything that this year has taught us is that we need to be prepared for just about every eventuality.

Traditionally, building and, more importantly, maintaining a disaster recovery site has been expensive and complex. This is why it was only something only large businesses partook in. But now the pay-as-you-use model, leveraging the power of cloud computing, has made DR economical for companies of all sizes.

Taking the Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) approach

What is Disaster Recovery as a service(DRaaS)?

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is essentially a cloud computing service model that allows businesses to back up and replicate their business-critical data to a third party. This way, it can be accessed and recovered in the event of a catastrophe, making it easier to get the business up and running as soon as possible.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has increased the deployment of DRaaS solutions across industries. With uncertainty looming, the DRaaS market is poised to grow exponentially. The DRaaS market is likely to touch $12.54 billion by 2022, up from $1.72 billion in 2016, according to Markets and Markets study. The growing adoption of cloud-based solutions by businesses of all sizes, including Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) has made it easier for them to go for a DRaaS plan.

A DRaaS model, in addition to being highly cost-effective, can protect from natural and human-made disasters, achieve data and geographical redundancy, enable robust failover testing, automate the recovery, and help manage datacentres remotely.

To give a Disaster Recovery plan example, if there is an earthquake near your premises and you experience a power outage, bringing your business to a standstill, a DR plan will kick in. With pre-set disaster response actions, your Managed Service Provider (MSP) will be able to reach the information stored in the cloud and restore critical data and software. This will minimize the negative impact on your business, which would otherwise be out of action for a few days.

Tips for choosing the right DRaaS solution

Pick an MSP that works with multiple solution providers: Along with looking for an experienced MSP, you need to narrow down on one who partners will the top backup and DR solution providers and cloud players in the industry. This is crucial to get the choice and flexibility you need to safeguard your business. Avoid MSPs that force you to pick the one vendor they partner with.

See if applications will be replicated to multiple locations: Ideally, the DRaaS solution should make multiple copies of your critical business data and store it securely at numerous locations. This ensures that in the event of a disaster and if your regional data center also goes down, the other data centers can quickly recover your data.

Choose a partner that offers quick, reliable failover: The primary purpose of a disaster recovery plan is to protect your data and applications and ensure minimal disruption to the business. Ensure your provider is capable of rapid failover in the event of a disaster and allows you to prioritize your data basis criticality.

Look at how they measure their SLA: Check their SLA performance and if they are willing to customize the SLA to meet your unique requirements. Ideally, they should have a financial stake, which means their compensation should depend on your DR success. Use these parameters to build an iron-clad SLA.

Check security and compliance adherence: With essential business data backed up with your DRaaS partner, security and compliance should be your top priority. The digital and physical security of data centres is paramount.

With Parablu’s BluVault you can ensure that your data is encrypted, while in transit and at rest, in line with strict regulatory requirements, such as GDPR. Further, it allows you to have complete control over the data by providing you with encryption keys.

Don’t forget the end-user: The solution must secure user data in all SaaS applications and endpoints. Ensure they take a multilayer security approach to protect your business, such as encryption and user authentication, among others, as well as comply with regulations such as HIPAA and SOX.

Ask for 24X7 customer service: Your business-critical data will lie with your DRaaS provider. Make sure that they provide the help you need every step of the way – from deployment, management to execution, with round-the-clock access to support engineers.

Request for referrals: While the provider may be great on paper, you must ask for referrals, testimonials, and case studies of their current customers. This will help you gauge how well the DRaaS partner can help you in a real-life situation and make an informed decision.

 No organization, big or small, is safe from a disaster. The consequences of a disaster event can range from financial to reputation loss. In some cases, it becomes exceedingly tough to bounce back from such an event. DRaaS is then a perfect solution to protect your IT infrastructure and to ensure business continuity while the primary infrastructure is restored.