Business managers know that disaster recovery is crucial for business survivability, but it’s expensive and there’s little apparent return on the investment. For technical staff, disaster recovery is an additional responsibility on top of their every day jobs, and it’s hard to execute the necessary steps and manage and monitor the recovery process. Recovery takes too long, is too manual, and is too reactive. Testing the process is a major stress on both the technology and business teams.
Solving the Disaster Recovery Challenges
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) helps address the disaster recovery challenges for both business management and technology staff.
For business management:
DRaaS is cost effective. There’s no need to invest in unused hardware at a secondary site; the need for software licenses is also reduced. In addition to the reduced capital expenditures, the operational costs are also reduced, as the company’s IT staff doesn’t need to spend time performing maintenance and support on the DR equipment.
Beyond the reduced expenses, DRaaS minimizes downtime and the impact of an outage on business operations. DRaaS procedures are designed to allow operations to failover to the backup site rapidly using reliable tools to streamline the process. The cloud allows alternate servers to be brought online quickly. As a result, outages disrupt the business for less time.
For tech staff:
DRaaS provides a robust disaster recovery process. Rather than relying on homegrown tools and processes, the vendor’s tools make executing the failover easy as well as offer visibility and monitoring. The panic that occurs during a crisis and the scramble to bring systems back online is eliminated and replaced by executing a well-defined process. This sense of comfort with the recovery process is enhanced by the ease with which it can be tested; testing disaster recovery using DRaaS requires bringing up temporary servers and is much less disruptive to routine operations.
DRaaS also makes it easier for tech teams to adapt to growth, through its scalability. There’s no need to continually add hardware at a secondary site; new servers are readily available in the cloud. DRaaS also lets teams more easily tailor their response to the specifics of the situation, rather than forcing all workloads to follow the same process.
DRaaS even benefits tech teams outside of their disaster recovery functions. Like all systems, the servers at a backup site require regular maintenance, including patches and upgrades. Using DRaaS eliminates the need for the team to support, track, and monitor these idle servers, freeing up their time for working on other business critical projects.
New Disaster Recovery Challenges
The benefits don’t mean that DRaaS doesn’t bring new challenges of its own. As with all cloud services, there is some risk with offloading a corporate function to an outside organization. Companies need to evaluate the capacity and reliability of the DRaaS provider carefully.
In addition, the need to transfer large volumes of data to the cloud will have an impact on a company’s network bandwidth that needs to be evaluated and addressed in order to make certain there’s adequate capacity.
For many companies, the benefits offered by DRaaS will far outweigh the new challenges it introduces. Contact dcVAST to learn more about our Disaster Recovery as a Service offering and begin exploring the benefits it will bring to both your business management and your IT teams.
Additional Resources about Disaster Recovery
Reduce the Risks of Disaster Recovery with DRaaS
