A category of cloud computing, draas empowers teams to offload the management of disaster recovery functions to third parties. This reduces the burden on IT staff and eliminates the need for dedicated secondary sites. It’s an excellent choice for businesses with limited budgets and resources who want to leverage a robust, high-availability, resilient solution for business continuity.
Techopedia Explains DRaaS
Disaster Recovery as a Service, or DRaaS, is a backup and failover solution that uses a third-party infrastructure to provide a complete and secure offsite copy of an organization’s primary environment. This environment can be an on-premise server or a private or public cloud platform, depending on the needs of the client. DRaaS replicates data and application environments, then enables the failover process in the event of a disaster. It allows the IT team to restore systems and continue operations while avoiding downtime for end users.
The DRaaS solution uses the pay-as-you-go infrastructures of public cloud providers to make a secondary site affordable to many more teams than would otherwise be able to afford it. DRaaS can be combined with other types of disaster recovery solutions, including a business continuance plan (BCP) that provides a detailed plan for ensuring continuity during a disaster.
Companies should consider the different DRaaS options before choosing a provider. A good DRaaS provider should offer an extensive service level agreement, or SLA, that details the vendor’s responsibilities in the event of a disaster. For example, the SLA should detail how the vendor will prioritize customers in a disaster, whether the vendor can meet agreed-upon recovery times and what happens if a natural disaster causes both the primary and backup environments to go down simultaneously.
Another consideration is the type of backups used. The best DRaaS solutions use continuous backup that replicates and stores critical data automatically. The system must be able to back up both the operating system and the full configuration of the database, end-user devices and server environment. Ideally, the backups should be stored in two formats, including one stored offsite. This meets the 3-2-1 rule, which stipulates that organizations must have three copies of data, two forms of backup and one offsite storage location.
Once a DRaaS plan is implemented, testing should be performed periodically to ensure that the process will work as expected in a real disaster. Some DRaaS solutions enable nondisruptive testing, which can save valuable time during a disaster. Others require that the client perform its own tests to ensure that it can recover its systems in a timely manner, without the DRaaS provider needing to intervene. Regardless of the implementation approach, a comprehensive DRaaS plan should be in place to minimize the impact of a disaster on productivity, brand and reputation.