DRaaS Leads Companies Into the World of Cloud

As more and more large enterprises adopt cloud technologies, there are still many small- and medium-sized companies that have yet to take that leap. There are economic incentives that make the movement to the cloud beneficial, such as trading capex for opex expenses, but these enterprises lack some of the skills and resources to successfully navigate the migration. These companies can instead get a taste of the cloud through cloud-based services like disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS). DRaaS uses a secure, managed cloud as a target site to help organizations recover entire applications or sites by providing a means to failover.

While some companies can build and maintain their own on-premises secondary site for that purpose, the approach is very expensive. Parts of their budgets which could be going to activities that support the bottom line will instead be needed to build out an entire data center, hire people to maintain it, keep the site cool, etc. With the cloud, companies can offset that financial burden to their cloud service provider and they are left only paying for as much computing power or storage as they need.

Protecting Data

In a way, building a data center for disaster recovery (DR) applications is similar to buying a new car to go on a road trip only once a year. It’s unnecessary. Companies can offset costs with a hybrid cloud mix of public and private cloud environments. But, they still need to consider how they will protect their data.

Taking DR to the cloud is a great start; however, few can run full production in the cloud if they’ve never done it before. Furthermore, developing a hybrid cloud just to run DR on can be an extra cost burden.

Even if you ignore the cost, the issue of expertise alone is enough to drive many companies to adopt DRaaS. Ransomware attacks bring down all types of groups across the world, and according to IDC, more than one-third of organizations have been targeted by a ransomware attack.

Many organizations aren’t comfortable taking on full responsibility for protecting their data. They lack the time, resources, and skills to sufficiently defend themselves against ransomware attacks. A recent IDC study showed that more than 40% of companies surveyed reported they lacked IT knowledge and skills to manage DR.

Thus, the DRaaS market has been growing 40% year after year, as more organizations seek the solutions that DRaaS offers, like a reduction of capex costs and protection from ransomware and natural and man-made disruptions and outages.

A Simple Solution

DRaaS is a simple solution that takes on a company’s difficult work and provides the necessary expertise to both run and protects data applications in the cloud. When organizations choose DRaaS instead of developing their own cloud for DR, they don’t have to worry about developing network and firewall infrastructures, buying storage and predicting capacity, providing maintenance and support, or scheduling downtime to conduct tests.

Companies can offset DR to the cloud using DRaaS providers to take over the heavy work. When DR organizations provide their services exclusively over software, this can also save money for storage and physical servers. Offering data centers close to the customer’s operations can also lead to faster performance. Additionally, commitment to service level agreements (SLAs) determines recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) standards.

There are two different offerings for most DRaaS: Self-service and fully managed. Self-service DRaaS is a prepackaged offer that includes a third-party site for replication and the assumption of full responsibility for the client’s data and application. This offering is well-suited for companies that want to move to a pay-as-you-go model to reduce their data center footprint but also want some level of control.

Companies that lack technical personnel but have high-security requirements would be well suited for a service provider which offers a fully managed DRaaS with a public or private cloud. These services are backed by strict SLAs managed by professionals with extensive experience in DR. The provider takes care of all the cloud DR design, installation, and maintenance.

Choosing a DRaaS Provider

There are many DRaaS providers available to companies. When considering which to choose, organizations should look for:
● A software-only solution with the ability to scale to the client’s needs
● A non-disruptive solution that will not halt operations during setup and ongoing testing
● The fewest barriers when moving workloads to the cloud
● A clear cost advantage over on-site private cloud
● Extremely fast, near synchronous replication
● A solution that is hardware and software agnostic

Both individuals and organizations have been using the cloud for years without really considering it, whether it’s streaming personal content or office applications. Often, these experiences are taken for granted. However, when it comes to protecting a company’s data and applications against threats like ransomware, it is extremely important to really understand the DRaaS service you’re using. These experiences can help us to embrace the cloud even further.