Many businesses are choosing Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) as their disaster recovery solution. There are several benefits of this. First, it can be highly cost effective. As a cloud-based service, you pay only for what you use. Second, it can be very efficient and effective. These services are typically highly automated, meaning they run reproducibly, without error. Third, using DRaaS eliminates the need for maintaining your own backup hardware, which reduces maintenance demands on your staff.

DRaaS Defined

There are many cloud-based backup and recovery services, so it’s helpful to define exactly what’s meant. According to Gartner, DRaaS requires the provider to own the physical infrastructure used for the service, along with creating the runbook, implementing the backup creation and replication to cloud, and automating the failover process when the disaster recovery plan is invoked.

DRaaS Choices

Because DRaaS is complex, not all implementations meet all these requirements. Gartner describes three variations of DRaaS:

Fully Managed

The DRaaS provider takes full responsibility for the complete disaster recovery process. Even in this scenario, your team is responsible for ensuring full details of your infrastructure are communicated to the vendor, along with the appropriate recovery time and recovery point objectives.

Assisted Recovery

The DRaaS provider handles the infrastructure and replication, but the customer creates the runbook and executes the recovery procedures when necessary.

Self-Service

The DRaaS provider supplies tools that support recovery procedures, but they do not configure the tools or the procedures. The customers handle configuring the recovery environment, including virtual machine replication. Your team may need to build many individual scripts to automate the backup and recovery process. One example of self-service DRaaS is Azure Site Recovery in the Azure cloud.

Choosing the appropriate DRaaS solution for your business depends on your technical capabilities and your business needs. Because a vendor-supported DRaaS solution usually comes with a service level agreement, your recovery is guaranteed to complete within a certain time. This minimizes risk, but can be expensive. A self-service solution offers lower costs and more flexibility. You may even choose different solutions for different areas of business, depending on the requirements of the specific departments.

Prescient Solutions helps customers develop and implement disaster recovery solutions that meet their business needs. Our IT consulting and managed services help businesses in the Chicago and Schaumburg area assess whether DRaaS is the right disaster recovery solution for them. Our experts can implement and manage your DR solution, whether handled by DRaaS or by a solution in your data center. Contact us to learn more about how to decide whether you should use DRaaS as your disaster recovery solution.