Everyone Needs a DR Plan, But Do You Need DRAAS?

Posted by alvina on March 30th, 2018

A disaster in term of what and how it affects a business can be anything from equipment failure, infrastructure damage, cyber attacks or natural disasters. It is vital to have a company disaster recovery plan in place to ensure business continuity. The disaster recovery plans should constantly be updated especially regarding cyberattacks, as well as regularly tested. Many big corporations and multi-nationals have a separate site to ensure that business operations continue as normally as possible.

How does disaster recovery work?

There are two vital elements of how disaster recovery works, recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).

RPO refers to the ultimate age of the files that need to be retrieved from backup storage devices. These files are the ones essential for normal operations to resume. Also, it determines the frequency of backups, for example, every 2 or 4 hours.

RTO refers to the maximum time allowed to recover files and to resume normal business operations. It is vital to keep the amount of downtime of the business to the absolute minimum. For example, if the business sets the RTO to 2 hours, then the business cannot be down for any time after 2 hours.

The RTO and RPO assist with choosing the best disaster recovery strategies for your business, as well as procedures and technologies.

Preparing for a disaster is no easy task, as it needs a fully considered strategies across hardware and software, power, networking equipment, and connectively. Also, regular testing will ensure that disaster recovery is attainable.

What is DRAAS?

Not many companies have the internal capabilities of formulating a disaster recovery plan themselves. For those organizations, there is DRAAS (disaster recovery as a service). DRASSessentially means that the physical or virtual recovery elements are managed by a third party.

All DRaaS elements will be managed and thoroughly documented in a service level agreement, and the third party will provide the recovery elements via cloud computing. The benefit of DRaaS is that a third party is less likely to experience an actual disaster, especially is the third party is located in a completely different area. For example, in a case of a natural disaster and almost complete shutdown, a third party vendor in a different location will be able to ensure that business can operate as normal as soon as allowed.

Advantages of DRaaS

DRaaS allows business to reduce the time it takes to get applications up and running as data will not have to be restored via the internet. DRaas is beneficial to small and medium-sized enterprises that do not have the expertise or resources to develop and test a disaster recovery plan. DRaas also means that companies will not need to invest in off-site disaster recovery environments.

Disadvantages of DRaaS

Using DRaaS means that companies will need to trust their service providers impeccably to kick in the disaster recovery plan in the event of a disaster. Other disadvantages could be possible performance problems with the cloud environment and migration of data issues.

No matter the what strategy you decide to follow, it is essential that every business have a disaster recover strategy in place. Should you not have the expertise, there are third-party providers who can help you develop a strategy right for your business.