3 Reasons why Disaster Recovery as a Service is Your Best Choice

IT environments are becoming more intricate as enterprises are implementing data center, cloud and edge infrastructure while also using applications that run across multiple application-tiers with different service requirements. Across varying locations, tiers and service level agreements, how do you effectively protect your business and keep the lights on?

Over time, businesses have invested in a range of point products to protect themselves from an attack or outage. Typically, each solution is designed to support a specific environment, application-tier and service-level. As a result, enterprises are forced to manage multiple solutions for different infrastructure and application types, driving up complexity and producing a higher risk of data loss.

DRaaS simplifies operational complexity by providing a DR orchestration and automation service for application tiers that replicates data and workloads to a cloud environment, spins them up when needed, and re-directs traffic to this new location during an outage. Once a fix is applied, automated failback can gracefully restore operations without business disruption and spins down the cloud environment as it’s no longer needed. With this solution, businesses can simplify operations—benefiting from a unified policy framework across workloads, application tiers, and both cloud and on-prem environments.

Traditional disaster recovery solutions require a physical secondary datacenter, or an alternative site that can be used to run business operations in the event the primary site goes down. Most often, the costs associated with these secondary sites can be astronomical. Even if the site is unused, businesses have to pay property costs, utilities, maintenance, and have the appropriate staff in place to manage and maintain all the required equipment and applications.

Instead of using a secondary physical site, DRaaS allows organizations to use the cloud for failover/failback in the event of a network outage or breach. With the cloud, there is no need to pay for unused hardware and software infrastructure. Leveraging a consumption-based pricing model, businesses only have to pay for the cloud infrastructure they are using during the outage period.

When experiencing an outage, it is the business’ priority to get their systems and operations running as soon as possible. According to Gartner, businesses will lose $5,600 per minute for each minute of system downtime.² If extrapolated to hours or days, these losses can be catastrophic.

A traditional DR approach may experience latency when it comes to triggering a failover, as it takes time to power on a secondary site and transfer all necessary workloads and data to the new location. As a result, businesses run the risk of not only losing valuable data but also their customers.

DRaaS provides seamless failover to the cloud with automated and orchestrated recovery that meets Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs). Organizations are easily able to ensure operational recovery in minutes, reducing the impact an outage may have on their bottom line.