What is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaas)
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is a service model that allows an organisation to back up its data and IT infrastructure in a third-party cloud computing environment and provide all the disaster recovery orchestration via a SaaS solution.
The as-a-service model means that the organisation need not own, nor manage, the resources or handle all the management for disaster recovery, instead rely on the service provider. DRaaS provides very short recovery timelines and on-demand, ready-to-use compute resources, for instant restoration of the applications.
Disaster recovery planning is critical to business continuity. Like other traditional disaster recovery solutions, DRaaS keeps an organization’s business-critical applications operational and enables the company to run in case of disruptions like a hardware failure, a ransomware attack, or even a natural disaster.
There are three engagement models. In Managed DRaaS, Simplex takes over all the responsibility for disaster recovery and is best suited for organisations lacking the expertise or time to manage their own disaster recovery. There’s also Assisted DRaaS where the customer maintains responsibility for some aspects of their disaster recovery plan. This model is best suited for organisations with unique or customised applications that might be challenging for a third party to take over. However, organisations with experienced disaster recovery experts on staff can opt for the Self-service DRaaS model where they are responsible for the planning, testing and management of disaster recovery while Simplex provides consultancy and does frequent DR drills.
As part of our toolchain, we employ Veeam Backup & Replication, a single platform for modern data protection, and the Veeam Disaster Recovery Orchestrator which offers one-click site recovery and DR testing. For customers who are on Microsoft Azure, there’s Azure Site Recovery, the native disaster recovery as a service for Azure, as well as Azure Backup, a secure, one-click backup solution.
Benefits of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaas)
Traditionally, organizations relied on backups to resuscitate applications in the event of a disaster. However, in modern times, backups fail to solve critical data loss and downtime problems since the backups are often incomplete or non-restorable and data restore can take hours and days. Also, when a server fails, procurement of replacement hardware takes time.
DRaaS offers the ability to bring operations back to production in minutes and is an affordable and seamless solution for businesses of all sizes. Overall, DRaaS improves the availability of critical applications while enabling cost reduction and efficiency. These solutions also unify all the elements of DR into a single solution allowing for easier testing and management of virtual machines, backups, and replication.
Disaster Recovery Plan - What we do
At Simplex, we undergo risk assessment of our customers’ environment and conduct a business impact analysis. Basis that, a DR strategy is designed and executed.
