What Are DRaaS Solutions?
DRaaS solutions are managed backup and disaster recovery services provided by third parties to protect businesses from downtime, minimize RTOs and shorten RPOs when disaster strikes. Generally, these services are offered through a subscription model or pay-per-use pricing that includes storage, bandwidth, compute costs and license fees for backup software applications. This pricing structure allows organizations to avoid the cost and hassle of purchasing and installing a DR solution themselves. These solutions also reduce the risk of a ransomware attack by keeping critical data safe and available, without the need to pay a ransom to recover lost files.
Using a DRaaS solution can dramatically decrease the time needed to restore business operations after a disaster. This is because instead of having to recover from local backups, a disaster recovery site in the cloud can instantly take over for primary systems and resume critical operations. For many companies, especially those that run mission-critical applications or store large volumes of data, this is a significant benefit.
In addition, a DRaaS solution can provide organizations with increased protection against ransomware attacks by keeping key data in the cloud, eliminating the need to pay a ransom to regain access to data. The best DRaaS providers can offer a range of different services designed to suit the needs of any organization. These solutions can include everything from basic disaster recovery to full orchestrated failover and recovery for the whole enterprise, including on-premise systems, virtual and physical data centers and private clouds.
To implement a DRaaS solution, IT staff use a cloud management interface to select the virtual and physical servers they want to back up. The DRaaS provider regularly takes snapshots of these servers and stores them in the cloud, ready to be recovered when the original servers fail. IT teams can then test the DRaaS solution with simulated failures to ensure the failover process works properly.
A DRaaS solution can be based on a number of different platforms, from bare metal to hypervisor to VM-based. One example is Nutanix, which offers a DRaaS service that can be used to protect data stored in on-premises infrastructure, as well as data in the cloud. The company’s DRaaS platform uses VMware vSphere technologies to replicate on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, and is integrated with other VMware administration and operation components for ease of integration.
Once business discussions have taken place and an organization understands its RTO and RPO requirements, it should look at potential DRaaS providers. The selection process should include a careful analysis of the providers’ technical capacities and compliance with specified specifications, as well as a transparent price structure. While there can be a temptation to move quickly, it is often better to migrate applications in stages, testing and vetting the new solution in each phase. This way, the project can be completed in a timely manner, and any issues can be addressed in an appropriate timeframe. draas solutions