Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) can make it easier for your organization to recover after a disaster. By using a cloud-based recovery service, you have accessible backups plus support that helps you restore operations. As you evaluate whether a specific DRaaS offering will meet your needs, make sure the DRaaS is a complete recovery solution. Review the offering and assess it in these areas:
1. How much automation does the solution provide?
All DRaaS offers some level of automation to help recovery; the more automation, the faster you’ll be able to get your applications running again. Review how much of the recovery process can be automated and how much manual intervention is required, both during the recovery and the fall back to primary systems. Understand how easy it is to update the automated process when you have changes in your primary data center.
2. How flexible is the recovery solution?
Flexibility can be assessed in two directions. First, does the DRaaS solution let you control whether you recover an entire site, an individual virtual machine (VM), or something in between? Second, does using this DRaaS solution in any way restrict your options for production storage and VMs? Are you locked in to this provider or would it be straightforward to change replication and switch to another DRaaS service?
3. What level of consistency does the solution offer?
Evaluate whether the recovery ensures database consistency, application consistency, or neither. Depending on how consistent the DR site is, your technical and business teams may need to take steps to make sure data is not lost and normal operations can resume.
4. Will the DRaaS site meet your recovery objectives?
Using DRaaS doesn’t eliminate the need for recovery point and recovery time objectives. Understand how the DRaaS solution impacts your ability to meet the business’s need for minimal data loss and minimal downtime. Know how network limitations may impact your ability to recover and ensure you have appropriate network bandwidth and latency.
5. How robust is the solution?
Know how many backup copies are kept, where they are stored, and how long they will be available. Make sure your backup site is in a different geographic location from your primary site in order to protect you from a regional outage. Also, because even cloud providers can have outages, understand how the DRaaS provider plans to recover from a disaster of their own.
6. How can you test your disaster recovery plan?
Relying on DRaaS doesn’t eliminate the need for having a disaster recovery plan and should in fact make it easier to test your plan without impacting your production environment. Find out how to conduct a DR test using DRaaS and whether it will interrupt the replication that’s protecting your primary systems.
7. How will the vendor support you?
Having support from your DRaaS provider when you are recovering from disaster is key to making the process as painless and easy as possible. Understand how your vendor will support you, whether they’re available 24/7/365, how their staff is trained, and what their service levels are.
dcVAST offers Disaster Recovery as a Service to help your business recover from an outage as quickly and smoothly as possible. Contact us to learn more about why you should use DRaaS to simplify your disaster recovery planning.
