As businesses adopt cloud platforms for better computing agility and efficiency, securing data from natural and human disasters has become an important consideration. Traditionally, this involves a company establishing a backup and recovery location or emergency offsite facility to keep its systems backed up in case of disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods. This can be expensive and time-consuming to implement, however, as companies must invest in infrastructure and equipment to ensure the backups are in place, along with the cost of power and space for the facility itself.
As more organizations adopt a cloud-based approach to their IT infrastructure, disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solutions have emerged to streamline and speed up the process of restoring data from backups. In addition, a DRaaS solution offers a more secure alternative to keeping physical copies of backups on-premises. With WAN-optimized replication that doesn’t impact production workloads and global data deduplication, these solutions can be much more cost-effective than traditional methods of backing up data.
There are several types of disaster recovery cloud solutions available to meet the needs of any organization, from basic file and folder backup to full image-based backups and clones. DRaaS also provides the ability to restore from snapshots or point-in-time copies, so that the recovery of any application or server is possible, regardless of when it was taken from backup. In addition, a DRaaS offering will provide granular recovery options, so that only the data needed can be restored, which can reduce storage and network costs over time.
When considering a disaster recovery cloud solution, it’s important to consider the total cost of ownership and scalability of the solution. The cost of the solution will depend on the configuration chosen, with higher-cost solutions supporting warm standby or multi-site disaster recovery deployments that can offer faster and more reliable recovery. In addition, the more cloud environments and resources a business chooses to support its disaster recovery strategy, the more administrative work is required to manage them.
Choosing a DRaaS provider that offers a managed service can help to cut down on costs and administration, as it will handle all of the management of the cloud environment and the DR orchestration. This can be an especially good option if a company doesn’t have the time or expertise to handle all of the responsibilities on its own. However, it’s important to remember that a third party is responsible for managing the solution, and it will be important to communicate with your DRaaS provider on an ongoing basis in order to keep them up to date with any changes in the IT infrastructure, applications or services.