Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
What is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)?
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is when an enterprise writes data to a cloud service provider that offers backup services in a managed data center. DRaaS covers the data system and application software, while also providing the necessary servers and storage resources to spin up the clients' servers and applications for continuous operation in the event of a disaster.
How does DRaaS work?
DRaaS providers replicate a subscriber’s physical disaster recovery sites to the cloud for rapid restoration of data servers and applications when needed. Restorations can be initiated from anywhere using most types of computers, allowing an organization to recover its data directly to a disaster recovery site in a different location if its data center is unavailable. The cloud instantly mirrors any data changes that occur at the primary site, updating automatically and can restore environments to a point seconds before an outage occurs in a matter of minutes.
Issues to consider when choosing a DRaaS provider
There are a few aspects that organizations should carefully consider when choosing between DRaaS providers.
· Capacity: Because the volume of data to be restored can be very large, the cloud backup service must have enough bandwidth and resources to handle the data transfer.
· Location: Because disasters can be region-based, the cloud data center should be far enough away from the organization using it to ensure recovery capabilities.
Why do organizations choose DRaaS?
Organizations facing the prohibitive cost of traditional disaster recovery are increasingly turning to cloud-based backup solutions. But because disaster recovery plans must be tested regularly to ensure they continually function and meet business objectives, organizations face the cost of staff time to oversee testing that is also a major expense. And the additional tasks of monitoring, verifying, scheduling, and trouble-shooting can require more technical skill than an organization’s IT staff has readily available in-house.
Types of cloud disaster recovery
There are three main types of disaster recovery in the cloud. The differences between them depend on the production environment to be replicated.
Cloud-to-cloud recovery
In a production environment that is virtualized either in a private or public cloud, a hypervisor is used to manage replication.
Hybrid cloud recovery
Here, both single cloud or a hybrid environment is replicated and recovered to a cloud service such as Microsoft Azure.
Server-to-cloud recovery
This option works to recover data when you have either non-virtualized physical servers and mainframes, or a mix of multiple virtual servers such as Hyper_V and VMware.
What are the advantages of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)?
With DRaaS, you get the benefits of cloud DR—near-zero data loss, fast failover, and a strong offense against cyber-attacks—along with expert services to plan, provision, and manage the process. The following are some key benefits:
· Scalability: Leverage the flexibility and agility of the cloud to scale on demand from a buffer capacity.
· Speed: Get much faster recovery due to the near-constant contact between primary and secondary environments and guaranteed RTOs and RPOs for various workloads provided by your DR vendor.
· Consolidation: Eliminate multiple point solutions for apps and workloads dispersed across the public or private cloud and everything in between with a single enterprise-class platform.
· Simplicity: Get the convenience of a single user interface across cloud, core, and edge, with the same security and compliance methods implemented throughout.
· Cost efficiency: Eliminate the need for upfront capital expenses for infrastructure and applications and pay only for what you use.
· Reduced staffing needs: Free up staff time by using automated failover processes or make a single phone call to your DRaaS provider. This allows your staff to work on revenue-generating projects, rather than disaster recovery planning and management.
· Reduced risk: Limit manual processes with automation and orchestration that allow for almost instantaneous failover, for faster time-to-recovery with priority applications and virtual machines brought up correctly every time.
· Enhanced security: Use your vendor’s failover resources to protect your environment and ensure business continuity 24/7.
· Easier compliance: Maintain a unified set of retention policies with one provider administering universal compliance requirements across all locations and business units.
Is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) right for you?
Regardless of the disaster—ransomware, data breaches, equipment failures, or natural disasters—companies need to consider whether as-a-service recovery makes sense for their needs. In fact, your business has its own set of downtime risks and system dependencies that may or may not align with DRaaS. An acceptable amount of time from failure to restoration may vary and the maximum amount of data loss allowable is also different for each business.
Your business continuity plan can vary based on these four key issues:
1. Downtime
2. Criticality of applications
3. Data currency requirements
4. Application outage tolerance
With DRaaS, you can get back up and running in as little as 15 minutes, as hardware and servers are always at the ready to restore data and software from backups. If your company does not need the rapid recovery of such synchronous replication, asynchronous replication, which you can purchase as a simple backup service, may be more beneficial for your environment.
HPE and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
HPE has the expertise you need in regulatory compliance, security services, and hybrid cloud deployments to help you secure your data from edge to cloud. Secure your backup data and harness its true value with HPE GreenLake for Data Protection. As part of the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, these services offer disaster recovery service with Zerto and backup with HPE Backup and Recovery.
Designed to meet your data protection needs without up-front capital expense or overprovisioning risks, HPE GreenLake delivers cloud protection instantly, and you can deploy your on-premises data protection solution in a matter of days. With our platform, you gain the flexibility to modernize data protection with a holistic solution—from detection to response—along with simplified processes and tools for on-demand, cloud-native backup, and recovery. In addition, you gain our expertise and experience to manage planning, design, implementation, testing, and operation, which allows your staff to focus on creating business value rather than routine recovery. It's all delivered with the agility of elastic scale and a pay-per-use structure that links business value to use.