Every enterprise needs to prepare for emergencies, which is why disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) has emerged as an attractive cloud solution. DRaaS has been popularized in recent years by big tech players such as Amazon Web Services, IBM, and VMware, but it’s also offered by many regional cloud providers for those who prefer a more personalized experience.
Here are reasons to think about DRaaS to protect your business:
How DRaaS Protects Data
Disaster recovery as a service is a cloud-based solution for backup resources during downtime caused by natural or man-made catastrophes. DRaaS is also known as business continuity as a service (BCaaS). It allows you to maintain business continuity with backed up applications and data while the primary platforms undergo maintenance. Many times DRaaS is offered as part of a disaster recovery plan (DRP) or business continuity plan (BCP).
No business should assume they are free from disruptive events such as hardware failure, power outages, cyberattacks, or human error. It’s better to be prepared for these circumstances instead of assuming that you have flawless security or other technology. That’s why it’s wise to always backup your data and have copies of your applications available on secondary servers. Ideally, these backups are done in multiple, including remote off-site, locations. Without backups, you run the risk of data loss, damaged files and applications, customer dissatisfaction, government investigations, and lawsuits.
Benefits of Cloud-Based Replication
The key to the effectiveness of DRaaS is that it allows you to replicate your infrastructure in a cloud data center and at remote sites. A major advantage is that you can test your backups easily without affecting your primary infrastructure even if you prefer using local servers. Another advantage is that you will have continuous backups to multiple sites so that you are not constrained to one backup solution.
DRaaS provides the flexibility that not all DRP solutions offer. You will be able to replicate any type of data and applications, regardless of brand or platform. Another dimension to its flexibility is you can use it to backup all or partial components of your system. That’s important to smaller businesses that cannot afford to backup data that isn’t considered critical to costly storage solutions. While DRaaS often involves backups on virtual servers, it can also be achieved with physical servers.
It’s unlikely that a high-quality cloud provider will suffer from an entire shutdown, since the best data centers use backup generators that kick in during a power failure. But just to be safe, they provide backups on remote servers as well. Small to mid-sized companies typically do not have these options when they rely on local infrastructure.
Furthermore, companies that employ their own in-house IT staff often do not have the expertise or resources to deploy a disaster recovery plan in the event of an emergency. Ideally, your IT team is constantly learning and testing new technology, but in-house IT personnel can become complacent and lazy if management doesn’t demand or understand technical expertise.
Conclusion
If you want a simple turnkey solution to data and software protection, consider disaster recovery as a service. It’s designed to keep downtime to a minimum. Contact us at Idealstor to learn more about how we can protect your digital assets so that you can focus on your business.