The threat of a disaster striking your business isn’t a question of “if,” it’s a question of “when.” Natural disasters, cyber attacks and other uncontrollable events can take down your entire IT infrastructure and cause catastrophic losses. But, it’s possible to minimize the monetary impact of these events with cloud disaster recovery services.
Cloud disaster recovery (DR) services enable organizations to protect critical data and applications by backing up the data to an offsite server. It also enables you to restore this data and resume business operations when disaster strikes.
To do this, you must develop a comprehensive DR plan. The first step is to identify your IT assets and determine what needs protecting. This will include understanding your current environment, including what hardware, software and data you have. You should also evaluate your ability to continue operations during a disaster event.
Once you’ve completed this evaluation, you can begin planning your disaster recovery plan and implementing the technologies that are right for your organization. There are several different types of DR services, each with its own benefits and drawbacks. Here are some of the most popular options:
Backup as a Service (BaaS): This option offers cloud storage and infrastructure for backup and recovery services. It’s usually much faster to transfer backup data from BaaS to your cloud VMs and databases than it would be between your on-premises environments and the cloud, because networks within the same cloud typically offer more bandwidth than those that connect the cloud to external environments.
However, BaaS is a fairly expensive solution because you must pay for both the cloud storage and infrastructure to use it in the event of a disaster. Additionally, you must have sufficient internet connectivity to support the transfer of large amounts of data during a disaster event.
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS): Unlike BaaS, a DRaaS solution provides full replication of your entire IT infrastructure in a remote location. It consists of virtual servers that mirror your physical servers, which are then accessible in the event of a disaster. Typically, you will experience some latency when running your applications from the remote servers, but this is better than having to deal with the expense and hassle of recovering data and applications from damaged or destroyed physical servers.
DRaaS can be an affordable solution for disaster recovery because you only have to pay for what you use. Plus, it’s easy to scale up as your business grows, and you can test the capabilities of your DRaaS solution at any time. Moreover, many DRaaS providers have automated testing features that help you validate your recovery plans. However, it’s important to consider the security and reliability of a DRaaS provider when selecting one. Make sure to research the company to ensure that it’s using a secure data center that meets industry standards and has multiple geographic locations in case one of its facilities is affected by a disaster. Also, it’s a good idea to select a DRaaS solution that includes a service level agreement. draas solutions