What Is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)?

Many businesses with small IT departments  can’t afford to devote the time needed to researching, implementing, and thoroughly testing disaster recovery plans. DRaaS offloads the burden of disaster planning from the organization and places it in the hands of disaster recovery experts.

It can also be much less expensive than hosting your own disaster recovery infrastructure in a remote location with an IT staff on standby in the event of a disaster. If a disaster does not occur, the costly second infrastructure and personnel are never used.

How Does a DRaaS Protect the End-User?

End-user devices require DRaaS protection more than ever in the future of remote work. Devices will continue to operate outside of the office firewall, making them vulnerable to malware and ransomware on a daily basis.

While business applications and servers are safe in a data center or the cloud, end-users working from home offices on laptops are not. Because remote work is now the norm, these devices are more vulnerable and may contain more unique and recent copies of data.

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is a cloud computing service model that allows an organization to backup its data.

It uses an IT infrastructure in a third-party cloud computing environment, providing all DR orchestration through an SaaS solution. This service is used to regain access and functionality to an IT infrastructure after a disaster.

The as-a-service model means that the organization does not have to own all of the resources or manage all of the disaster recovery. Instead, it relies on the service provider.

A DRaaS replicates an organization's systems and data to a public or private cloud infrastructure. In the event of a disaster at the primary site, the data will be switched to the recovery service, allowing the organization to continue operations. The failover process is the responsibility of the DRaaS provider.

Business continuity requires disaster recovery planning. Many disasters with the potential to devastate an IT organization have become more common in recent years:

  • Natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and earthquakes.
  • Failures of equipment and power outages
  • Cyberattacks

How Does Disaster Recovery as a Service Work?

Cloud computing enables easy disaster recovery, thanks to the replication and hosting of physical or virtual servers by a third party. This provides a failover in the occurrence of a business disruption or power failure. The procedure uses the following steps:

Cloud computing enables easy disaster recovery, thanks to the replication and hosting of physical or virtual servers by a third party. This provides a failover in the occurrence of a business disruption or power failure. The procedure uses the following steps:

Replication

Data from a primary site is replicated and sent to a disaster recovery service provider, which hosts the environment remotely. Because most organizations have infrastructure that relies on both virtual and physical servers, it is critical that replication includes a "hybrid" solution.

When data is frequently added or modified, the DRaaS solution should support regular da How Does a DRaaS Protect the End-User?ta snapshots to prevent data loss during failover.

Failover

During a disaster, end-user access is transferred to a secondary site hosted by the disaster recovery service provider. For DRaaS solutions, speed is critical, as any downtime can be costly to the business.

Failback

Data is transferred from the DRaaS provider's environment to the primary site. To ensure continuous protection, the replication process starts as soon as the failback is complete.

Cost of Disaster Recovery Services (DRCloud) and Downtime

Disaster recovery is frequently viewed as an expense rather than an investment. It is critical to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of safeguarding data, systems, and applications.

You can obtain the necessary information by reviewing your budget to capture costs such as infrastructure expenses (from staff to IT hardware) and revenue losses. Your costs will also vary depending on whether you choose a self-service, assisted, or managed DRaaS.

Disaster recovery as a service is affordable, and your company can use DRaaS for a predictable, flat monthly fee. If you do not opt in, your company could lose up to £100,000 per hour of downtime, which is the typical loss reported by 98 percent of organizations.

DRaaS vs. Backup as a Service (BaaS)

In the event of a disaster, the service provider will migrate an organization's computer processing to its cloud infrastructure. As a result, even if the original IT infrastructure is completely destroyed or held hostage, the business can continue to operate.

This differs from backup as a service, in which a third-party provider duplicates only the data and not the ability to process the data. BaaS is typically less expensive than DRaaS because it only protects the data and not the infrastructure.

Although BaaS can be a good solution for businesses that need to archive data or documents for legal reasons, most organizations that use it will want to pair it with another disaster response tool to ensure the business can continue to operate.

Preparing for a Disaster with DRaaS

True DRaaS replicates an entire infrastructure on virtual servers in fail-safe mode, including computers, storage, and networking functions.

An organization can continue to run applications; it simply runs them from the cloud or hybrid cloud environment of the service provider,  instead of the disaster-affected physical servers.

This means that recovery time following a disaster can be much faster, if not instantaneous. The processing and data are migrated back onto the physical servers once they have been recovered or replaced.

Customers may experience higher latency when their applications are run from the cloud rather than an on-site server. However, the total business cost of downtime can be very high, so it's critical that the business can get back up and running quickly

DRaaS service in Gibraltar

The backup and disaster recovery packages of the IT Lab ensure that all of your company's IT systems, settings, and data are backed up in a remote location, so you never have to worry about them. Implementing a variety of availability services can assist your company in increasing uptime.

Being partnered with Veeam, all of your cloud, virtual, and physical workloads are protected in a simple and flexible manner.

Backups are constantly being supervised by engineers to ensure that they are successfully loaded every time. Our team  performs regular routine testing to ensure that your backups can be used in the future and are not corrupt.

Given that outsourcing DRaaS is the best way to use this service, and taking into account the reliability of services in Gibraltar, choosing a Gibraltar-based service is a smart decision.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that a wide range of risks, including accidental, malicious, and natural disasters, can pose a threat to your business. As a result, having a modern DRaaS solution in place is critical to ensuring your organization's ability to withstand any disaster.

Using a DRaaS service provides quick failover of your critical workloads to the cloud, greatly improving your business continuity capabilities.

This ensures instant data availability for all critical workloads, making your infrastructure more resilient and cost-effective, regardless of the type of disaster that occurs.