How DRaaS Exactly Works?

Ensuring business continuity with a full spectrum of data calls for multiple checkpoints, including the elimination of complex IT silos, operation simplification, and cost reduction while meeting your SLAs. Plus, when you need to be adaptable, mobile, and available at all times, the risk of data loss increases in tandem with the prevalence of modern technologies.

As per a Ponemon study, the median cost of an unplanned Data Center outage goes up to $9000, while the maximum downtime can cause damages of $2,409,991. This makes it imperative to bring backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions that offer efficient cloning, snapshot and replication capabilities, thus providing a greater level of protection at a lower expense.

To achieve maximum data availability, Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) allows third-party Cloud backup of data and IT infrastructure. It also ensures the restoration of IT services after a catastrophic event.

But what is DRaaS?

DRaaS addresses the shortcomings of a disaster recovery plan by protecting your data against the unexpected but common occurrence of a natural or manmade disaster.

For instance, natural disasters account for 35% of all power disruptions. The remaining 55% are technical, while the remaining 19% are the result of carelessness on the part of the human operators. Office efficiency can be maximised by having a dedicated disaster recovery strategy and regularly testing it.

Let’s understand how it works.

Step-By-Step Approach

Most companies, no matter how big or small, are turning to DRaaS to shore up their shaky disaster recovery procedures. By combining Cloud backup with virtualisation, Data Centers (DCs) can provide a full replacement for conventional disaster recovery. It essentially calls for a two-step process.

Step 1: Backup

At times, marketers may say things like, “it’s not about backup; it’s about recovery,” but without a decent backup and one that collects data frequently, recovery is either impossible or meaningless. Therefore, the first order of business is to create a reliable backup: Having a copy of your critical data, including operating systems and programs, stored in a safe and secure location. It also means that information should be transferred off-site as soon as possible.

Backup solutions in the Cloud are highly effective at securing data and supporting a wide range of platforms and software. Since they are designed to transfer only modified data, they can do backups quite often. If you’re using a Cloud backup system, the local appliance should be a staging place where backups can be duplicated once more before being uploaded to the Cloud. Together, they ensure that the company’s data is backed up regularly and stored securely off-site at all times.

Step 2: Recovery

Organisations might start thinking about recovery strategies once they have established a routine for backing up their data. In most, if not all, scenarios, the business will not suffer from a Data Center-wide disaster or even a server failure frequently. Most likely, they need to retrieve specific files or folders. The local equipment is best in those cases because it allows for speedy and simple data transfers.

A DRaaS service is useful when a business experiences a disaster involving its servers, storage, or entire physical location. A system administrator in this situation should be able to launch the affected programs, even if they’ve been damaged or stopped working.

IT managers should have their most important programs ready to go in the Cloud in case of a site-wide outage. A company’s disaster recovery plan can be put through its paces on the Cloud.

The Importance of Automation In DRaaS?

While not strictly a phase, disaster recovery-specific automation should permeate the entire procedure. Employees are usually confused when a disaster strikes the company or the world at large, with keeping track of their to-do lists and worrying about their families and possessions.

Under those circumstances, following a detailed instruction manual will be challenging. Instead, DRaaS solutions offer pre-tested push-button automation so that IT only needs to access the graphical user interface and click a button to transfer applications in the event of a disaster.

Benefits And Drawbacks Of DRaaS

Some benefits of DRaaS include:

• Gets rid of the requirement to build out a separate disaster-recovery Data Center and outfit it

• Does not necessitate a carbon copy of the primary Data Center’s storage hardware at the DR site

• Delivers DR capabilities to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that may not have the personnel or resources to develop a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy

• Allows internal IT resources to be reallocated to more pressing matters

Some drawbacks of DRaaS include:

• The IT department must rely on the service provider to react promptly and help the business reach its recovery point objectives.

• There could be scalability problems with Cloud-based software

• There may be problems with bandwidth, especially if data replication is ongoing

• Possible over payment issues

To Sum Up

DRaaS represents a revolutionary step forward for many businesses because it negates the need for a second site and the associated capital expenditures. IT must be aware of the inner workings of these solutions to evaluate them properly. Ideally, DRaaS systems can perform frequent backups of the complete environment, store those copies locally and in the Cloud, and perform automated recovery in the event of a disaster.

There is no “one size fits all” method for ensuring business continuity or selecting an appropriate data disaster recovery solution. Ideally, you’d pick the features you need for your specific use case and then apply them to private and public Clouds.

Integrating with a trusted third-party data protection solution, such as Web Werks VMX, will ensure application consistency and consistent data recovery.

After carefully analysing your data infrastructure, our specialists will develop a customised backup and data recovery plan to meet your needs. Our asynchronous DR that orchestrates data across multiple Data Centers can recover data instantly from any VM, SQL, or Oracle replica with no additional provisioning storage, thus saving your time, resources, and upfront costs. You can also minimise data loss with near-synchronous DR that supports Lightweight Snapshots (LWS) running on SSDs, making your LWS highly scalable and distributed in the long run.

Web Werks VMS safeguards your business-critical workloads with metro data recovery services. This acquires a zero RPO at the VM granularity level and ensures the continuous availability of applications. Lastly, a cohesive backup can be created with our DR in the Cloud.

Each service is customised to create a robust solution. To learn more about our DRaaS offerings, please visit https://webwerksvmx.com/disaster-recovery-as-a-service or contact us at +91 8097 522 490.