DRaaS

What is DRaaS?

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solutions store business IT infrastructure and data in a third-party cloud. Another term for DRaaS is business continuity as a service (BCaaS) since the main goal of DRaaS is to ensure the business can continue its daily operations after ransomware attacks, natural disasters, power outages, and other infrastructure level failures. Once the main infrastructure is down, companies can control their backup data via a mirrored cloud infrastructure.

DRaaS solutions provide failover insurance through a mirrored cloud environment which is crucial for business continuity and data recovery. This falls under the concept of disaster recovery, in which any major failover will automatically shift IT operations to a mirrored server. Since most businesses are not equipped with the IT experts and the budget to implement their own disaster recovery solution, a managed third-party disaster recovery model is preferred due to cost and ease of management. 

Types of DRaaS

Depending on what a DRaaS is being used for or the industry a company is in, one of the three different types of DRaaS will be utilized.

• Self-service DRaaS: Self-service DRaaS allows businesses to plan their disaster recovery operations. While a self-service model is highly flexible and adaptive to individual needs, the business will be responsible for most of the disaster recovery strategy and execution. The third-party vendor only provides the cloud infrastructure and software for business instead of consulting and management.
• Assisted DRaaS: Assisted DRaaS designates the service provider as a consultant to handle disaster recovery implementation, testing, and updates. Businesses will be responsible for failover execution, so they must set up their own service level agreement (SLA). SLAs contain recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). RTO is the time to restore business operations after a disaster to prevent major consequences. RPO is the amount of data that can be lost without affecting the baseline.
• Managed DRaaS: Managed DRaaS lets the service provider manage every aspect of the DRaaS processes, from planning to execution. The company offloads all DR responsibilities, and the vendor will be carrying out the recovery process in the event of a disruption. 

Benefits of using DRaaS

DRaaS solutions minimize business downtime and data loss when disaster hits. Compared to traditional backup and disaster recovery software, DRaaS provides additional services to enhance infrastructure resiliency. Some of the notable benefits are: 

• IT empowerment: DRaaS software shifts the burden from the internal IT team to a third-party vendor, which empowers the team to focus on other priorities that offer greater business value.
• Business continuity: Daily operations can continue as usual on high availability without the added concern for downtime through the automated recovery process.
• Flexible scalability: Compared to on-premises disaster recovery software, DRaaS solutions allow users to scale their resource allocation according to their needs without server limitations. 
• Cost efficiency: Companies no longer have to pay for hardware maintenance or invest in a dedicated recovery team. 
• Ransomware recovery: While DRaaS can’t prevent ransomware attacks, it can restore corrupted data in a remote server, ensuring that business operations won’t be locked down.

Basic elements of DRaaS

The format for a DRaaS can vary from industry and use case, but a complete DRaaS will include the following elements:

• Auto recovery: It can automate the recovery schedule and process on critical application and data environments without manual IT input. 
• Discovery: It automatically detects connected applications and servers and maps their dependencies, so the system runs bug-free.
• Incremental backup: It helps with continuous syncing data from the main server to the backup server by uploading small amounts of data while keeping the overall integrity of the data up to date. 
• Failover availability: Failover servers need to be located in multiple remote locations with good bandwidth for data connection and transfer.
• DNS Redirection: When the disaster hits, the DRaaS server automatically redirects DNS requests from the original server.

DRaaS best practices

In order to make DRaaS work effectively, users must follow these best practices:

• Identify business objectives: Every industry and company has a different level of SLA for RTO and RPO. Stakeholders should identify how long the business can function offline and how much data would be lost before hurting the baseline. 
• Determine the budget: Once the company determines the cost of going below SLA, it can use that cost to set up a baseline for the DRaaS budget. 
• Consult with DR experts and internal stakeholders: Both parties should identify what infrastructure needs to be recovered when failover triggers. By only protecting key sections, the cost of DRaaS will become much less. All of this must be planned according to system dependencies and severity levels. 
• Run tests: There should be multiple test cycles on the failover system to match SLA requirements. The failover process should be a seamless experience without major manual input. 
• Ensure continuous maintenance: New applications and databases will change system dependency in the future. IT administrators should schedule routine integration and modify configurations based on new updates. 

DRaaS vs. DR

A disaster recovery (DR) solution is more expensive considering the infrastructure and maintenance costs. Still, many enterprise companies already have a similar setup for their own backup solution and data storage warehouse. They can utilize their existing infrastructure for maximum flexibility on DR planning. 

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) has similar results to DR, with service providers accessing the benefits of the public cloud. Since most organizations don’t have an offsite data warehouse for backup, they would need to prepare for capital investment and hire additional IT administrators. By using DRaaS, companies gain disaster recovery capability in a short period of time without significant initial investment.