Creating backups is one of those tasks that sounds simple in theory but becomes much more complicated once you get started. Identifying everything that needs to be backed up is one thing; successfully backing everything up so that you can restore a consistent view of the data is another.
And creating backups is just part of the problem of business resiliency. Having all that data backed up isn’t the real goal. The real goal is being able to use those backups to make your business operational again as quickly as possible in case of a disaster.
One solution to meeting recovery time objectives and getting your business functional again is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). DRaaS doesn’t just back up data and store it offsite. DRaaS replicates data and virtual and physical servers to cloud-based sites where you can quickly failover in case of a disaster.
3 Benefits of Disaster Recovery as a Service
There are three main benefits businesses can get from DRaaS.
1. Failover is smooth and rapid
DRaaS relies heavily on automation and orchestration tools. This eliminates the need for staff to execute manual, time-consuming, and error prone recovery procedures documented in a runbook. This automation is especially critical for recovering multi-tier applications where application dependencies make the sequence of restarts essential in restoring service.
2. The costs of maintaining a secondary site are reduced
With DRaaS, businesses don’t need to build their own secondary data centers. Plus, because DRaaS is scalable, the cloud-based secondary site can grow or shrink according to business demand. As when moving production operations to the cloud, disaster recovery in the cloud can be sized to meet the current demands, rather than built out with spare capacity. Additional capacity is available on demand.
3. The IT team is freed up for other business priorities
Your IT team may be spending more time on disaster recovery-related tasks than you think. Planning the process, installing the software, writing the scripts, and testing the plan aren’t one-time tasks. Plus, every time a new server is brought online at your production site, a corresponding server needs to be brought online at your secondary site as well. All that secondary equipment requires monitoring and maintenance, too. When those jobs are taken over by DRaaS, your team gets that time back to focus on meeting your production needs.
Make Your Business Dynamic, Not Just Resilient
What’s even more important is that these benefits impact your business beyond allowing resilient operations during a disaster. By freeing up your IT team and by eliminating major investments in a largely unused disaster recovery site, you have more time and money for adding new services in production, too. And bringing those new services online takes less time, too, because you don’t need to build out a secondary site, too. In other words, DRaaS doesn’t just help you respond to disasters; it helps you respond to opportunities, too.
Disaster Recovery as a Service from dcVAST
dcVAST offers DRaaS, leveraging Amazon Web Services to offer a robust disaster recovery service with 24×7 support. Our team provides the ongoing support needed to let your business go on if disaster strikes. Contact us to learn more about how you can use DRaaS to make your business resilient and dynamic.
