Disaster recovery planning is critical to business continuity. Like other traditional disaster recovery solutions, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) keeps an organisation’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.
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.
Benefits of DRaaS
Traditionally, organisations 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.
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.
Engagement Models
A growing number of enterprises are implementing backup and recovery solutions to improve business continuity and resiliency, and these managed services are likely to see the most adoption in the next five years. According to an industry report, the global DRaaS market is expected to rise at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.3 percent, from USD 5.1 billion in 2020 to USD 14.6 billion in 2025.
At Simplex, as part of our operational resilience offering, we undergo risk assessment of our customers’ environment and conduct a business impact analysis. Basis that, a DR strategy is designed and executed. 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.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema
