A draas solution is a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) tool that helps organizations avoid costly downtime by replicating IT infrastructure in the cloud. This typically reduces capital expenses that would otherwise be required to deploy secondary data centers, with the added benefit of meeting recovery time objectives (RTOs and RPOs) and providing a high degree of availability.
IT teams use a management interface to select virtual machines and physical servers that they want to back up. DRaaS providers then create and store snapshots in the cloud to be used for failover. Users typically pay for storage of snapshots and synchronization between the primary and secondary sites, as well as usage fees during a failover event.
Most DRaaS solutions offer both physical and virtual recovery environments. Depending on an organization’s needs, it may be important to choose a solution that supports both. Ideally, the solution should replicate and host both virtual and physical IT infrastructure, enabling users to recover applications from either the virtual or physical environment. This also ensures that the solution can support a hybrid deployment where applications run on both the primary and backup environments.
Ideally, a DRaaS solution should be able to provide push-button failover, meaning that users are able to get back to work quickly with minimal disruption. This typically requires a solution that offers fast and efficient replication, which can be achieved through a combination of several factors. These include:
To avoid costly downtime, it is essential to understand the impact that an outage will have on your business. This will help you determine the appropriate RTOs and RPOs for your business. It is also essential to understand the costs of an outage, from infrastructure expenses to lost revenue. This will help you calculate the return on investment for your DRaaS solution.
Many IT organizations find that the best way to roll out a DRaaS solution is to partner with an MSP who can help design the system and assist with implementation and testing. A good MSP can also provide unbiased advice on which DRaaS technologies are best suited to an organization’s specific needs and uses cases.
An MSP can also help an organization determine if it is more cost-effective to use a managed DRaaS service or self-service DRaaS, and which services vendors are most suitable for the organization’s DR requirements. It is also important to identify which parts of the DRaaS solution that the organization wants to manage and which components it will outsource to a 3rd party. This can be done by reviewing the vendor’s DRaaS offerings and understanding which services are included in each solution. For example, some solutions allow the IT organization to manage the entire DRaaS solution, while others only provide support during a failure event. This can make a significant difference in overall cost and complexity.